Disc Read Error after client smashed laptop lid down

[Blue Banana]

So yeah, he was having a bad day and smashed the lid down with enough force do display the 'a disc read error has occurred, press Ctrl + Alt + Del to restart' message.

I have managed to recover the most critical documents and so on (which is pretty strange and amazing) but I'm getting a lot of read errors which prevents me from recovering basically everything else, it's very random.

Also, the the transfers from the sata laptop drive to my desktop is painfully slow for some reason, a 20mb folder will take about 10 minutes.

Now I seriously don't know enough about data recovery to know if I can save the hard disc and make it boot into windows again. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

[Martyn]

You don't know how much longer the drive will survive so rather than trying to get the data off the drive directly, image the drive and work off the image. I used Acronis a while ago and whilst it took a long while(several hours) I did get all the data off.

[iisjman07]

Yup, you're going to want to clone the drive. If you have UBCD4WIN there's a great tool on there called 'RawCopy' which will copy sector by sector to another drive. It always seems to be pretty good when I try it

[seedubya]

Why would you want to repair an obviously damaged disc? Replace it, copy back his data and tell him how lucky he is. Then hand him a book on anger management and run like f**k!!

[wimwauters]

Anger management is the least of his problems.

How about teaching him how to copy his data... but don't mention the 'backup' word

[coco3_man]

Originally Posted by seedubya

..and tell him how lucky he is...

...that he didn't crack the LCD as well!!