hard drive ok

[davidrusciano]

dropped my sony lap top, no current back up. computer is Attempting repars,
repairing disk errors. This might take an over an hour to complete. great.


All I care about is my hard drive.

can I swap the hard drive into my other sony, same computer

 

[Night Hawk]

Hello davidrusciano Welcome to the Seven Forums!

OOPS! is the big word for dropping anything with a drive in it! I reinstalled Windows 3 times on a friend's laptop when apparently the kids may have dropped it a few times and a new larger, faster drive(500gb) added in to replace the 120gb it came simply quit one day where they lost a good number of family photos and other things from not backing things up as they go along!

The replacement 500gb was to see two installs the second due to a scam ware infection to explain why there were 3 there. For you however if the drive suffered from the fall it may fail soon where backing things up to another drive should be the first item on the list in case it does fail on you.

Repairing disk errors doesn't necessarily mean a bad drive on the other hand however if there some OS errors needing attention. Hard shutdowns and hard boots when programs and Windows locks up solid can produce errors even when the drive hasn't ended up seeing bad sectors form quite yet. The Check Disk tool may have been triggered to run for some other reason.

As for as swapping drives between machines that wouldn't be any solution. If the laptop itself was damaged and no longer works slaving the drive to another laptop by way of an external usb enclosure to save files from it and even using it as an external storage drive serves a better purpose.

On some laptops you will find they have room to add in a second drive without pulling out the optical drive. A second drive slot is provided. You would still boot from the other laptop's own drive as the host boot drive however.

 

[davidrusciano]

can I not swap it out just to see if the data is safe

 

[Night Hawk]

That you can do at anytime. The two laptops if the exact same model would be using the same model drive as well.

The only problem would be any activation issues appearing since it will still be a situation of hardware changes due to serial numbers between the two however. That would be from trying to run it as you would the original drive there.

Simply dropping the laptop depending on high away from the floor or surface as well as force of impact wouldn't see files lost unless the drive was actually damaged in some way. If the drive became unreadable due to damage to the amature holding the read/write heads or now has bad sectors then that would become obvious once the drive was in the other portable and something was wrong besides any activation flags apearing about an invalid or this could be a counterfeit copy of Windows message being seen.

The other options mentioned are for long term considerations in case the drive or unit suffered damage and you had to rescue everything you could from the drive.