I encountered this message recently on my new Sony Vaio under warranty. The laptop was not recognizing the hard drive. Sony has shipped a new hard drive. A mobile tech company has represented that they can slave the old hard drive with a SATA cable and access the data because the hard drive was not damaged due to trauma the OS was merely corrupted and if it is slaved to a working OS the data will be accessible. My three questions are as follows-

1. Is this true and can I do it myself even though I am not a very good geek?
2. What sort of cable do I buy to slave it up to the new working laptop?
3. Is Pc Decrapifier the best utility to clean a fresh computer?

1. Should be easy enough.
2. A sata to usb adapter would be your best bet.
3. Yes, but get ccleaner too, google will easily find it!

Hello,

We are assuming your laptop still recognised the disk.
Can you enter the BIOS and check if the hard drive is actually detected?
Did it come up with an error message saying no operating system was detected please insert a disk or did it attempt to boot from something else say network boot?

No the bios do not recognize the drive and I have now attempted to slave the drive to a working computer with a SATA to USB adapter and the drive is unreadable. The drive does not seem to be spinning. Is it likely that something could be repaired to get the drive to limp enough to get a couple gigs of data off.

A professional data recovery agency is what you will need to get data off that and that will be stupidly expensive.

I always say to all of my customers "if you can't afford to loose it, back it up!".

Rik, you probably say that all the time and then when they blow it you say it again. I truly hope I've learned my lesson this time. I knew better.

I say it so often that I get fed up with it, but if they listen, they save themselves money!

Data recovery does not have to be expensive if the drive is still spinning. Take it out and hook it up to another computer (with a $25 cable) and use as an external drive to extract your data. It is a service I offer to my clients and is NOT $$$.If the drive is dead, then it need a white-glove-environment to be taken apart for data extraction.

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