Bad HD?

[Face Rapist]

I have an old Acer Laptop that has been broken since I got it. I really don't know why I kept it until earlier when I was playing with it and turned it on. It still works but it wont recognize the HD. It gives me an error on boot up that says HD cannot be found or something. I don't know if its just a bad HD or what. I took it apart carefully and checked to see if the HD was knocked loose in such case that the laptop had been dropped. But it was still connected, screws and all. Anyone have any other ideas of what would be wrong with it?

[Binary Soldier]

Are you unable to hear the hard drive spinning when you first switch it on?

As soon as you switch on the machine hold down the Del key (near the arrow keys) and you should be prompted to enter the BIOS, tutorial here (ignore the CD ROM part (http://www.hiren.info/pages/bios-boot-cdrom). Look in here to see if the hard drive is being detected by the motherboard. This is the first thing to check.

[MouthpiecePC]

If the hard drive is detected then the master boot record or something software related may be wrong. If you dont have the operating system disk that came with the laptop you can go to the manufactures website. Go to support (http://global.acer.com/support/download.htm), punch in your model number etc. You want to go to support. I am not sure what model number you have but some manufacturers like HP will have a partition on the hard drive to restore to the factory defaults. Post your model number and we can help you look it up.

[ChayesFSS]

take the drive out adn freeze it for a few hours and try it again

[Thantos]

take the drive out adn freeze it for a few hours and try it again
The theory on this is valid only until the HD warms up, and then it does not work ever again. (I'm guessing the dramatic temp changes cause too much stress on the hardware)

[beave]

i would pop out the hd and put it in a 2.5" external enclosure and try to see if you can get it recognize on another computer.