HDD going bad??

[Stevo808]

My compaq presario 1247 is giving me a message saying "operating system not found". Is there a way i can retrieve my data or back it up?

I cant reformat it because when i do it says "The data required to restore your machine from D drive is not present. Please contact compaq suctomer service."

Is the HDD dead already? thats what im thinking.

 

[STATus h2O]

Yes. Get yourself a hard drive enclosure. Its a device that your hard drive can plug into, that plugs into another computer via USB or Firewire port. The opposing computer will recognize it as a plug and play hard drive, and you can simply drag the data from your old hard drive to the other computer accordingly. Try it out, enclosures are awesome.

 

[Stevo808]

I have a external hard drive. How would i get the laptop connected to the external to my pc?

 

[STATus h2O]

I'm having a hard time understanding what you just wrote, could you rephrase that?

 

[Stevo808]

Theres no operating system installed so i cant get into my hard drive or the external drive.

 

[STATus h2O]

Are you saying you previously had the OS installed and now its crashed? You can easily get the data off that hard drive assuming the hard drive itself hasn't died. If you plug it into an enclosure and then into another computer via USB or Firewire, the computer will recognize it as another hard drive, plug and play. It will be like plugging in an external hard drive. Am I confusing you?

 

[Stevo808]

My external hdd has only one usb port, so its only going into the laptop. Is there some kind of usb divider so i can plug the laptop and the external hdd into my pc? I get what your saying but i just need to figure out how to connect them both to my pc because like i said, i just have one usb cord.

 

[STATus h2O]

No man...you actually remove the hard drive from the laptop manually. the hard drive itself plugs into the enclosure, which is connected to the other computer with the USB cord. You don't need the laptop for any of that.

 

[Stevo808]

**** my bad..i dont have a enclosure..just a external hard drive thats it.

 

[STATus h2O]

Yeah you have to purchase an enclosure, so you can retrieve the data off of that hard drive before you re-install Windows.