hard drive dead? help!

[jigme]

hi - sorry if this has been covered, i'm new to this forum, there's no search tool (!!!), and i've looked thru' A LOT of thread topics without finding anything relevant...

anyway - got home tonight to my pcg-grv616g, which suddenly won't boot - i get sony logo, then os not found. tried the recovery disk to see if i could get into safe mode and at least back-up my data before taking any further steps (as is traditional in these situations, my data is NOT currently backed-up...), but it wouldn't work - hard disk not found.

HELP!

please tell me my hard drive hasn't just died - warranty ran out last month (how do they do that? that timing's uncanny.), i doubt i can afford sony repair, and i NEED that data (and a working notebook...).

like i said, please HELP!

many thanks,
j

[kee-lo_]

Me as well James...

[jigme]

thanks, guys -

you're not clowns, i should have said: i'm pretty medicined-up here with Trend Micro PC-Cillin av and firewall stuff, with VERY frequent automatic updates (seems like once or twice a DAY), and pretty regular scans, so i don't think that's it. i run Ad-Aware Personal SE pretty regularly, too. call me paranoid...

Tyger, you said:

Bear in mind though that the hard drive diagnostics may give you the 'OK' green light even though some parts of the dignostic say it's on the way out so check em if you didn't already.

hmm. i'm not sure i'd know where to look or what to look for in these results... is there someplace i can read up about SMART info etc.?

cheers again,
j

[kee-lo_]

Using protection like AV and Spyware protection is very wise.

[jammold]

If you love a bed-time story, then read this SMART hard disk info - its a bit technical but it describes what SMART is and the gist of what it does and why you should care.

[TygerTyger]

I can't say I especially understand the SMART stuff either, but the second program James suggestions Drivesitter is pretty good at showing you what's good and what's not. Basically it gives you a number from 1 to 100 usually for each criteria, and then gives you the minimum number that particular criteria should be at. Most of mine were at 100 and got an OK rating in general but I had several very important criteria at 50 (the minimum for my drive) which rings alarm bells.

[kee-lo_]

TT,

Time to have your VAIo fixed I think....

[TygerTyger]

Yeah no kidding. The screen flickered since the day I got it, and now the hard drive is on the way out with the DVD drive fast overtaking it. My local Tesco must be doing a roaring trade in Valium thanks to me.

[kee-lo_]

Hope you can copy the stuff onto another PC via a network