Windows boot issue - dead hard drive?

Hi all - was given a laptop by a friend to take a look at. Pretty sure the culprit is a dying hard drive, but wanted a second opinion. Laptop fails to boot and she was getting constant 'Startup Repair' errors in Windows 10 on attempted bootup.

Now, however, when I try and boot it, it stays stuck at the ASUS logo screen (it's an ASUS F555L laptop) and sits there FOREVER before going straight to the 'Troubleshooting' screen (the one with options like 'Command Line', 'Startup Repair', etc). I went into the command line (which took forever) and tried to run a chkdsk and it gave me a "chkdsk is not available for raw drives" error message, which I've never seen before. Looking it up gives me the common thought that the file system is borked or unreadable.

I booted up a Linux Mint LiveUSB to see if I would have any better luck there, but it doesn't even list the drive/file system as mountable. I used GSmartControl to check the status on the disk and am seeing a lot of relocated sector errors (among others) and like 49 listed 'uncorrectable error in data' issues:


Pretty cut and dry that the hard drive is toast and that is the likely culprit, right?

Thanks! :)

As inexpensive hard drives and ssd's are...I would replace the hard drive. It does appear to be toast.

play2mefish said:

As inexpensive hard drives and ssd's are...I would replace the hard drive. It does appear to be toast.

Oh yes, definitely going to tell her to get it replaced as I can't even get it to work enough to access her files. Where the Chkdsk command is claiming the filesystem is in RAW format, is there a way to try and convert it back to NTFS to see if I can recover anything?

A eaw drive means it just lost the parition table you need specific parition recovery software like Partition Find and Mount — free partition recovery software if one doesnt work often another does

If you are going to make an image, it might be wise using something with the option to skip bad sectors:

Samuria said:

A eaw drive means it just lost the parition table you need specific parition recovery software like Partition Find and Mount — free partition recovery software if one doesnt work often another does

Bringing this thread back as I only just got time to look into it. I have the dying Toshiba drive in my external USB enclosure and am trying Find and Mount. Did an 'Intellectual Fast Scan' and it hasn't budged off of 0% scanned in like...30 minutes...?

I've tried that scan twice and both times it didn't move off of 0%. When I cancelled it the first time, it also said 'no visible partitions found'.

I can hear the drive clicking a bit, but it's the exact same pattern of 'click' each time spaced evenly apart, as if Find and Mount is trying to do things, the drive tries to do it, can't do it and then the cycle starts again...?

Well, you can try putting the hard drive in the freezer for a couple of hours, and then take it out and try again. I have done that before on a failed hard drive...but you have to be quick. But it does work. Something to try if all else fails...