75ZT Community

My wife's Advent laptop HD has failed...it is an EIDE HITACHI HTS541040G9AT00 Travelstar...apparently notorious for failing! It has lasted 4 years however...anyway... What can I replace it with that is cheap, spacious and reliable and will fit and work correctly?

Notebook and pencil?
...

Not too good with HDDs for laptops as they seem to be different sizes, but if you are after any data recovery try ZAR.

James.uk wrote:Notebook and pencil?
...

That was my wife's first reaction....except she likes to store her photos on it...

Thanks Monk...she had backed up all but one outing's worth of photos...

The HDD size is 2.5" if that helps?

Any 9mm HDD other than the Hitachi Carl, which has a very poor reputation for reliability.

Personally I prefer Seagate gut I don't really think, objectively, that there is a great deal between them and say, for example Western Digital.

The non SATA drives are becoming more difficult to source now I'm afraid Carl.

Still available are Western Digital 5400rpm 320GB Drives at £75.99
and smaller 160Gb drives 5400RPM @ £43.98.

Toshiba HDD's for laptops are generally reliable.

If you want to try get anything off of the old one, there are HHD enslosures available on eBay for very little money that allow to connect it to your pc via USB.

I use an old one, out of a laptop that died, as a pocket hard drive.

What some times works IF it is your hard drive that has gone .( this may sound daft, but it can work long enough for you to save Photo's and any thing else to a USB Stick.)

Take out Your hard drive put it in a sealed plastic bag with as much air out has posable . Then put it in your Freezer for a few hours then put it back into your laptop ,And you may find it will work again for a while.Have heard that sum last quit a while sum just a few hours.If they are really bad this will not work.Just make sure the bag is well sealed.
Good luck with what you deside.
Les

I had forgotten about the old freezer trick! I may give that a go...

Got a new Samsung 160gb with 8 mb memory for £35...can't complain I s'pose...not many EIDE drives left on the market now...

Thanks for all the help!

Buggery bollox...

The Hard Drive would not appear to be the problem....

Press 'on' the 'on' light comes up, the hard drive begins to spin and that light pops on...and then everything switches off again...the click would indeed appear to be either the HD or the DVD drive but simply the device switching off again....

Any suggestions? I have taken out the RAM and given the contacts a clean and can see nowt else amiss...

Sorry to say it could be one of many things.

Laptops suffer from soldering problems sometimes and a new motherboard or extreme violence is required in those cases.

Got to be worth removing as many bits as you can (hard drive, cd/dvd) and trying to boot into the BIOS. If this doesn't work, it may need extreme measures, or replacement.

Sounds like the kind of thing you get when the processor is getting too hot on a desktop.

Maybe have a good clean around any heatsinks etc.

My laptop died due to the internal power supply failing, hopefully yours can be sorted Carl.

MrB wrote:Sounds like the kind of thing you get when the processor is getting too hot on a desktop.

Maybe have a good clean around any heatsinks etc.

My laptop died due to the internal power supply failing, hopefully yours can be sorted Carl.

Managed to get a working replacement with a broken screen and no hard drive for £19.99.....so when it arrives I just have to bolt the two together...

Zeb wrote:

MrB wrote:Sounds like the kind of thing you get when the processor is getting too hot on a desktop.

Maybe have a good clean around any heatsinks etc.

My laptop died due to the internal power supply failing, hopefully yours can be sorted Carl.

Managed to get a working replacement with a broken screen and no hard drive for £19.99.....so when it arrives I just have to bolt the two together...

Well Done on finding that replacement.

Screens can be a bit of pain to swap over, depends how much dismantling is required.

Reminds me I need to list the screen off my old laptop on eBay and all the other bits that were still working.

Whole thing gets interesting when bits fail.

Have been doing a few things recently, involvig four laptops landing via ebay within two weeks. Cheapest was £8 but had no HDD, broken screen and basically dead. Keyboard was useful as was the memory.

Duncan wrote:Whole thing gets interesting when bits fail.

Have been doing a few things recently, involvig four laptops landing via ebay within two weeks. Cheapest was £8 but had no HDD, broken screen and basically dead. Keyboard was useful as was the memory.

Well.....I have time on my side re the rebuild....

Success! Rather like open heart surgery as I had to transfer the entire contents of the ebay laptop into my wife's...the case it came in was too far gone...and then swap over the screen, hard drive and dvd drive...however, the ebay laptop came with double the memory so a real bonus as these things are NOT quick! All up and running now...