Magnet destroyed my hd, internal hd is not detected

I left my laptop on the flor turned on, and someone left a bag with a magnetic closing mechanism right next to it, (the magnet was lest than an inch from the HD). and.when I came back, there was a error in the boot menu, when I rebooted, there was a "No OS found" error in the GRUB menu. I am dual booting ubuntu 7.10 and vista business.

When I tried to reinstall vista, I got a error, "canot load HD drivers" and there were no drives listed under the menu. I am posting this from ubuntu 8 beta, live cd

Please reply if you have any idea on how I can fix this, i dont really care so much if i loose any data, I just want to get my laptop working.

Thanks in advance....

 

magnets don't destroy hard drives.

 

Ouch...i have no idea about the hard drive...but is your screen ok with that magnet?!?!

 

Yes they do. Thats how the write data on to the hdd.

 

powerful magnets can, and will destroy hard drives if they have alternating magnetic feilds (degausser?). But I think you have to pass the magnet over the hard drive several times.

 

If it's an SATA drive, can you take it out and plug it into your desktop and see what you find there? SATA uses the same data/power plugs in 2.5" form factor that they do in 3.5" so compatibility is not an issue there.

 

Even if the magnet corrupted the data (which I'm not convinced about - the discs are inside a metal housing, it wouldn't kill the HDD electronics so the HDD should still talk to the computer.

John

 

Ouch, it must have been a really strong magnet for that to happen.

When my desktop broke down I took out the internal HD and bought an enclosure for it to use as an externl HD.

While taking the HD out of the desktop I was using a magnetised screwdriver (where i can change tips to different sizes and different types of tips (phillips/ normal/hex etc... and the tip is magnetised to the screwdriver and any screws which are on the tip also get magnetised)

Well anyway, I only noticed what I had done after removing the harddrive with this screwdriver and thought 'uh-oh' is the harddrive fine?

But I went ahead and booted it up in the enclosure and my data was still there and in working order.



But yeh, if you cannot get the HD to work, you can purchase a replacement HD and use your recovery disks / vista install disk on it.

 

It was basicly touching the HD for a couple hours. If a magnet didnt destroy it, How do you explain it then?

And magnets dont hurt LCD's

here a screenshot of ubuntu installer

 

Sometimes, things just happen that you can't really explain away easily.

Does the BIOS see the hard disk?

 

I can't explain what happened, but I wouldn't expect a magnetic bag clasp to cause the problem you have encountered. Otherwise we would all be having similar problems. However, I think my next step would be to download the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic software and run that. They usually provide an ISO file so you can make a bootable CD.

Does the BIOS see the HDD and report its model number / capacity?

John

 

it stays on the VAIO boot screen for about a minute or two, and bios does not see the HD


Edit: What is the manufacture of the HD in sony SZ 460NC?

 

get your facts before you post.. you've been posting false info quite a bit -.-;

 

Was this in a public area? I mean, maybe someone stepped on it... I'm just trying to offer an alternative explanation.

 

Was this in a public area? I mean, maybe someone stepped on it... I'm just trying to offer an alternative explanation.

 

no, it was in my bedroom, and the laptop is not damaged/scratched

 

Do you hear the drive spin up when turning the laptop on? Because the bios pausing during the post looks like what happened to my previous laptop when the drive motor failed....

 

A really strong magnet can, if it gets really close to the harddrive, corrupt data on your harddrive.

But it won't usually destroy the harddrive. (And it has to be a really powerful magnet to have an effect)

A magnetic bag clasp definitely can't corrupt (or destroy) a harddrive. It's far far too weak for that. (You can buy laptop carrying bags with those magnetic clasps. I think someone would have redesigned those if they'd been able to damage the laptop)

I think the drive has failed for other reasons.

 

Did you drop your bag when you put it down?

 

Did you try re-seating the HDD?
Love how you just had a bag of magnets sitting on your laptop.

 

the HD is spinning, but the little thingy in it is not moving, its really hard to open up the Sz so i dont really want to reseat it..

 

Can you elaborate on that further please?

 

ok. magnets can destroy a hard drive but i seriously doubt very many people have access to one strong enough to "destroy" a hdd. oh, let's not forget that there's a magnet inside the hdd.

 

where have i been posting false info? proof?

 

Fortunately, most modern storage devices, such as SD and CompactFlash memory cards, are immune to magnetic fields. "There's nothing magnetic in flash memory, so [a magnet] won't do anything," says Bill Frank, executive director of the CompactFlash Association. "A magnet powerful enough to disturb the electrons in flash would be powerful enough to suck the iron out of your blood cells," says Frank.

The same goes for hard drives. The only magnets powerful enough to scrub data from a drive platter are laboratory degaussers or those used by government agencies to wipe bits off media. "In the real world, people are not losing data from magnets," says Bill Rudock, a tech-support engineer with hard-drive maker Seagate. "In every disk," notes Rudock, "there's one heck of a magnet that swings the head.

 

You do not need a super powerful magnet to destroy the data on the HDD - we have one that can lift a small metal file cabinet (Mythbusters' style) - we use it to destroy data on the HDD's we scrap.

 

is it this strong?

"nstead, the team crafted a new generation of super-powerful magnets to penetrate hard disk enclosures to quickly erase magnetic media. Special high-strength magnets as powerful as those in medical imaging equipment proved sufficient for permanently erasing all information on a disk drive in a single pass.

To create a magnetic field strong enough to penetrate the metal housing around a disk drive and erase the magnetic media inside, the researchers designed a neodymium iron-boron magnet with special pole pieces made of esoteric cobalt alloys. A motorized mechanism pushed disk drives past the magnets; a back up twist-knob allows operators to manually pull drives through the magnetic field. "

just because your magnet has some muscle, doesn't mean it wiping the hdd. it's need to a muscular magnet on steroids and a half. i mean c'mon, there's a powerful magnet inside the hdd. people collect those because they're so strong. the head that writes data i believe is some type of "electromagnet". i seriously doubt very few have a access to a magnet powerful enough to wipe a hdd.

 

oh and the article i copied that from, it stated that they worked on this because of the emergency landing that US plane had to make in china and the gov't was looking for a quick way to destroy data on a hdd.

 

What, may I ask, was your Laptop doing

??? I hate to say it dude, but treating a presumably expensive and somewhat delicate device like a laptop that way is just wrong. I'd call it Karma. I mean really, how stupid is that? Leaving a running laptop on the floor?

 

I left it sideways leaning on the bed, downloading a torrent. I really dont think the HD does not need to be THAT strong, because I got a corrupted drive from using a magnetic screwdriver before...

 

OK. So you left it running and then later you found it had died. I had previously assumed that the computer was off.

I suspect that the HDD just decided that it had had enough of life. As I put in another thread recently, a mean time to failure of 100,000 hours translates to about 1 in every 30 HDDs packing up during each year of operation.

John

 

So you think the magnet is not related to the drive fail at all?

 

I don't think the magnet has anything to do with it failing.

There is one strong magnet inside your hard disk already, and I have taken one just as strong and placed it on top of a spinning drive while forcing the drive to run a defrag. 6 hours later, the drive tested fine with all the diags. That was some...maybe 4 years ago...the drive is still working fine to this day... I don't care much for this drive (obviously) but I wanted to test the hard drive-magnet thing. And FWIW, I have used magnetized screwdrivers on all PC components for the past 11 years or so, have not lost a piece of hardware yet.

Sometimes, things just happen.

 

Yes, it looks as if it died. HDDs usually have a manufacturer's warranty of 3 years or more (from the date of manufacture), so you might be be able to get it replaced. However, I don't think that Sony will help if the notebook's warrranty has expired but if you can extract the HDD from the notebook then you can contact the HDD manufacturer directly. If you are lucky, you might get something newer and faster as the replacement.

John