Hard drive gone after startup repair

[NightHawk21]

Hey guys. I got a Sony Vaio VGN-FZ470E about a year ago from my uncle, who just got a new laptop. The laptop was cleaned completly, and a brand new copy of windows 7 was installed on it. Anyways it was working fine up until until yesterday, where it crashed. After rebooting a message appeared to boot into windows normally of to run startup repair. I chose to boot into windows normally, but it crashed soon after (on the Windows Logo). The second time I booted it into startup repair and let it run. After I came back screen was no longer on startup repair and instead was displaying a black screen with "Operating System Can't be found on it". I know this message pops up if your hd gets loose, so I turned teh computer off, popped it over, and made sure the hd was securely in place. I booted it up again but I still got the message, so I grabed my home premium disk to boot into the system recovery options. I ran startup repair again, but got an error saying that startup repair can't fix the problem because it can't detect a hd. After that I went into System Image Recovery, and into the advanced tab to see if the hd was still showing up there. It wasn't but there was a new drive named Boot ( X: ) which contains a Windows Folder and a Setup application (Windows Installer) (Also the drive is showing that is has 28.4 MB free of 30.9MB, which doensn't make sense because the Windows folder alone is 819 MB). I even attempted to reinstall windows to see if it would be able to find the drive but it was also unable to recognize a drive to install unto. I fear my hd may be broken and all my files completely lost. Anyways hoping you guys might be able to provide some insightabout a possible fix or if I have ot buy a new drive. Thanks.

I'm gonna try using the methods in the "How to recover your folders/files when Windows won’t boot", but I have my doubts. I'm also gonna try installing windows onto an external hd and booting from there.

 

[seanc]

Sounds like your hard drive has failed to me.
You need to look in the BIOS to see if it is detected.
With older Sony models, you pressed F1 as the laptop was powering up.

 

[NightHawk21]

I got into the Setup Utility and under hard disk drive it says None.

 

[mailpup]

Then as seanc said, it appears the hard drive has failed. Replace it.

 

[NightHawk21]

Alright thanks guys. Any possible recommendations for a good drive at a decent price?

BTW I know its probably not possible but is there any way to recover any of the information?

 

[mailpup]

I don't know much about laptop drives but for desktops I prefer Western Digital Black drives. If you want someone to give you a specific recommendation, don't forget to mention the drive capacity in which you're interested.

Try placing the old drive in an external USB enclosure and see if you can access the drive's contents to copy the important files. If it is a SATA drive, alternately you can use an inexpensive SATA hard drive docking station. Most can handle both 3.5" and 2.5" SATA hard drives.

 

[NightHawk21]

Alright thanks I'll give those a try. I was thinking about a drive around 320gb hopefully for under $100.

Thanks again for the timely replies.