Acer Aspire 5315 laptop froze

[laptopnewbie]

Hi all, I'm rather a newbie at laptops, got some knowledge about desktops though.

My problem: I have an Acer Aspire 5315 laptop, came originally with Vista, though I formatted it and installed it with Win Xp using a slipstreamed XP CD.

Laptop is about 18 months old, but has seen heavy usage, approx. 18 hours/day!

Yesterday my wife was on the laptop when it froze on her and nothing would respond, so she switched it off! Left it for a few minutes and when she switched it on, it says system disk not found -- insert bootable disk. Did the obvious, no cd in cd rom, etc.

Checked Bios and it says HDD not installed.

HDD had been subjected to temperatures of about 80 degrees C a week or so ago, problems with fan.

I've heard and read stories of the "Click of Death" etc which indicates HDD is gone. How loud are these clicks? If I put my ear against the casing of the laptop, I hear the hdd (I think it is the hdd) doing a "rattling" sound and a few clicks when starting up, don't know if that is an indication or not.

I put my win xp install cd, cannot detect a HDD. I did not have right size screwdrivers last night, have got them today at work. Can anyone give suggestions on how to fix this?

Does it sound as if HDD is gone? If I open laptop up, what should I be looking for?
Got some data that I need to recover, last backup made was 2 months ago

 

[Lexluethar]

Sounds like your hard drive is dead. The 'click of death' is the sound of the write head on the hard drive crashing and hitting the platter or getting stuck. It is an obvious sound and you'd be able to hear a semi-lound clicking when the drive is being accessed.

You can try to take the hard drive out, then reseat it to see if that fixes it. If not you'll have to purchase a new hard drive since the BIOS isn't even detecting it (meaning this isn't an XP issue, but a hardware issue). The hard drive is usually just four screws on the bottom of the laptop that allows you to slip the hard drive out - very easy.

 

[laptopnewbie]

Thank you for your response. I had semi-formulated that might be the problem. If re-seating the drive does not work, anything else I should be looking at?

I've heard stories of putting drive in freezer for few hours, anyone successful at doing this, and getting a quick burst of data retrieval?

 

[kmote]

I've heard that works sometimes but the less you try to access the drive, the better your chances of recovering the data.

 

[MindoverMaster]

You could try the freezer trick. I never did it myself, but it did work for other people.