dell latitude d810: internal harddisk drive not found

[duckyreads]

Hallo! I'm posting for a very frustrated friend without internet; she called because at the airport, her computer (A dell latitude d810 ) made a weird noise physically (like a whirry clicky unhappy noise) and while loading made two 'beepbeep noises'.... and then failed to properly boot.

She runs Windows XP (though I don't know what service pack) normally, and hadn't made any hardware  or O/S changes, but the error shows as follows:

internal harddisk drive not found internal hdd hard error!
strike f1 key to continue, f2 to run the setup utility

She says the fan's not starting up - nothing's working. She went into the BIOS interface (which I admit is a bit over my head) and was soon after telling me about another error message --

no bootable device strike f1 to restart f2 to go to setup

She's assuming this is a physical problem, but isn't sure what to do. Can anyone help? Thank you for your time and patience, and sorry for the lack of much information.

[DaveLembke]

Hard Drive is crashed...   

Data may be lost for good

If the drive still spins, but clunks/clicks a computer repair shop may be able to sweep the drive to rebuild the data onto a healthy hard drive but this can be costly.

More costly is sending the drive out to be deconstructed and reconstructed by a hard drive data recovery center which can be $900 + to get data back.

[duckyreads]

Well. That's depressing. I'm assuming that that means she can't connect her hard drive up to another computer to recover the data, then?

Is this likely a physical problem, or something that went wrong with software, or...? (I've personally never had a hard drive failure that I know of -- when my computers die, they die in a spectacular, flaming-death sort of way.)

[DaveLembke]

The clunk or click and the system not detecting a hard drive that is present is an indication that the drive is undetectable due to a serious failure. Failures like this are generally caused to laptops when the laptop was bumped or dropped the wrong way when the drive is still spinning. Maybe the last time she went to shut it down it got bumped or jarred in some maner before the drive came to a complete stop. Drives also sometimes wear out and just fail although it is more common that the drive took a force of some kind when spinning that damaged its platter(s) where the data resides.

If the drive is attached as a slave she would need the drive to spin and armature to still move, and then use the sweep of the arm ( the click or clunk sound) is the sweeping of the arm, and use a $80 software called GetDataback NTFS in hopes of sweeping the drive and reassembling the data onto the other systems healthy hard drive.

I use this tool for data recovery, but depending on how bad the drive is you might get some data and sometimes no data recoverable with the software. A 20gb laptop Hard drive that I recovered data for took 7 days to process with the drive clunking and I was only able to recover about 80% of their data. 20% was so corrupt that it was useless. Fortunately my clients AutoCAD files that he worked weeks on without backing up were recoverable and only some music and pictures were gone.

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm