You can turn that off, but alas - it starts again when rebooted Live.

I wouldn't bother installing it if you were thinking of it; it really isn't meant to be installed.

I like the exploding Windows. I just engaged that on Mint, though it doesn't take 3 seconds, less than 1 actually.

Good luck.

Unfortunately, my sentiments are the same.  (fail) Why perform a backup if I can have another pint and not?  (bounce)

Same thing but hard drive recovery. I'm not sure it's going to be possible though. My daughter pulled my parents' laptop off the cabinet and it looks like it damaged the HDD. She said it was wroking fine for a bit but after a while it rebooted, then said drive error at post.

My usual GetDataBack can't do anything with it. It recognises the drive but just hangs while Windows is trying to make its mind up.

So, anything else I can try?

Freezer?

Think I might try that. It worked once years ago.

I booted the laptop from a Linux USB drive and it can mount the partition as read-only but doesn't show any contents.

Never tried it, but sounds like it's dead anyway so no harm in giving it a shot.

I'm pretty sure it did work. Had a HDD that couldn't be read in Windows, froze it and  when I took it out of the freezer it worked for a little while, long enough to get some data off.

It does look like the drive is dead unfortunately. Nothing backed up from it, years of stuff on there :S Worth a shot at putting it in the freezer.

Wonderful. I can access the recovery partition fine but the rest just doesn't seem to work :(

Freezer didn't help. Same thing this morning. Maybe it wasn't in there long enough. More likely it's DEAD.

But the recovery partition still works?

dd the whole device to an image.

Seems to. I could access the files in the recovery partition from Linux. The other partition showed the size and space used but couldn't shoe any contents.

Worth a try making an image. I'll try and find a HDD large enough when I get home and see if it will work.

Data could well be in tact just the FAT is damaged (if it still works like that for NTFS).

I think if that's all it was then GetDataBack would have done something. The drive is making funny noises too which definitely isn't a good sign.

Sounds like physical damage to actuator(s) and/or platter(s).

Definitely looks (and sounds) that way. I don't think there's much I can do with it :(

Can you run a mfg diagnostic on it, or get smart info?

Try spinrite at grc.com also available by Jim, I've had some success rescuing disks even encrypted ones.

Looks interesting. Worth a try. Thanks.

It's a Hitachi drive. Not sure if their fitness test program is going to be much help.

Maybe try Hitachi's seatools, it worked for us once when recovering a drive, but that wasn't hardware related. :/