A laptop is a midget when compared with a desk top; it is powerful though but its components are small and compacted together and squeezed into the little space available. The fabricators did the clever thing of making a piece of equipment you can walk around with; you can take to the field or travel with it anywhere.
A hard drive is a magnetic storage medium made up of flat circular plates coated with magnetic material. The data inside is stored on tracks and sectors on these surfaces. A read and write head is an electromagnetic tool that magnetizes spots on these disks.
In resuscitating a dead hard drive, one obvious thing that must be done is to open the laptop. Opening of a laptop requires the use of support manuals because it is fixed in a manner that the vendor and manufacturer alone should be able to open it. The objective is to remove the hard drive and with the support of a desk top, you should be able to read and go ahead and determine if there is a serious problem. With the support of screw drivers, you should be able to approach slowly the compartment that has the hard disk and remove. There are other handy tools that are available too that can assist you also in this exercise. Upon removal, get your USB ready as this will allow you access this condemned hard drive. The moment you plug in, the operating system is able to recognize the other hard disk immediately and start asking what should be done next. The windows XP in such a short time will be able to read everything in to your desk top computer. Thereafter you can burn a CD on all the data files recovered. This formula is more or less direct and easy; in other situations recovery may require going beyond and looking for data recovery tools. If by any chance the situation is more of a logical problem than a physical one that is; data is corrupt due to a virus attack, file formats have changed suddenly, unrecognizable data base formats, loss of partitions etc then software recovery tools must be consulted. These are tools that will turn everything upside down and put your hard disk in order. The many free samples in the market will do the following in an effort to restore work.
* Scan and clean the registry of any hanging files
* Put in order the FAT to open up access
* Recover any fragments of data from the drive
* Search the data drive thoroughly for any damaged sectors, mark and recover data
* Restore partitions and set the structures properly once again.
* Scan viruses, delete and put quarantine on the entire hard drive.
* Recover files in their original order and put all in place.
In summary, there will always be a way of preventing this happening and this involves making data backups regularly. It is preferred that hard disk backups should be done weekly to protect against any eventuality occurring.
