Second opion needed. is it the Hard drive?

[comda]

So today (just now) i was given a Fairly new toshiba laptop to diagnose. The thing fires up and shows me the "toshiba-Leading innovation" bios screen but will not enter into bios or boot menu unless the hard drive is removed. Ive removed the hard drive and it works. But does that mean the drive is bad? or dying? I plugged the drive into a dock and my secondary windows machine sees the drive and its contents. What do you think? i wanted to run a checkdisk but the computer wont do anything with the drive in it. CAN I run a check disk using another machine on it?

[DaveLembke]

Crystaldiskinfo might give you some info on that drive. The other issue is if UEFI was enabled on a corrupt build it could hang at the post and not go further as well as hot keys to bios non functional until the system default boots without a HDD or SSD in it.

http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html

[comda]

Sorry i didnt mention this. It does not have a UEFI bios. It it a windows 7 home laptop from at least a few years back. Intel i3 (first or second gen) 4gb ram 750gb hard drive which im running a checkdisk in windows on my tower right now,

[DaveLembke]

ok.... the crystaldiskinfo utility can read the drives s.m.a.r.t data and give you further insight on how healthy or unhealthy the drive may be. I use this tool all the time to check on drives and it has pointed out drives that have many reallocated sectors that otherwise checkdisk and other tools dont point out. I was then able to copy the important data to a healthy drive and 8 days later the drive died for good in the middle of a video encoding process taking a raw FRAPS game footage video and making a smaller AVI out of it with Virtual Dub which causes the HDD to run for about 45 minutes to 2 hours of constant read/writes.

[comda]

Alright. Ill begin copying everything off the drive immediately and then run the tool to see whats up. 

[DaveLembke]

I use the 2.7MB "Standard Edition" -  "Portable" ( Without Ads ) version of it btw which does not require installation and can run stand alone.

http://crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html

[comda]

Well i used the first link i was given and its annoying when software is bundled with "PC optimizer" but anyways, i decided to use "unstoppable copier" first to copy everything off the drive. But during this process the drive has churned and clicked more then a handful of times. i dont think i need software anymore to know this drive is failing. haha

[DaveLembke]

Hopefully you were able to get the data you needed off of the drive. If you need more data sometimes if you let the drive cool or chill the drive in the fridge and then use it right away you can get more off of it before it goes out to lunch. It all depends on if its platter damage, data corruption, or a drive controller or motor going out to lunch.