[Gritlad]

Dropped a tin of beans onto the bottom right bit of my laptop keyboard yesterday and it froze for a while. Then it would start with two options (normal start up and something else which was recommended) . Then today it has been running on Startup Repair (says it is repairing disk errors) for about 6 hours now and nothing has seemed to have changed and needless to say it still doesn't work.
So does start up repair ever work?
And will I have fucked my hard drive or can I still get my files off there?
 any info would be greatly appriciated before I take it a repair shop.
Im running windows vista if that helps.
Apologies for poor typing, on my phone...

[tomtom]

Sounds like its screwed your HDD

(though it could easily be other things..)

Good news is you may well be able to fix said laptop with a new HDD which are cheap
Bad news is you may have lost data on the HDD.

Easiest way to check (if you can - or this is what the shop will probably do) is take out the HDD - pop it in an external HDD caddy and plug it into another computer.. if you're lucky you'll be able to read all the data parts of your HDD (or most of it) and only the system (windows parts) files of the HDD are knackered..

If the data/files on the HDD are vital/important you can pay to retrieve data from them. I spilt tea on my laptop 5-6 years ago and spent c.£250 to get all my files off the completely non working HDD... they were all retrieved. Since then I store all my files and pictures on the cloud (via Skydrive - other brands are available)....

[Gritlad]

Cheers Tomtom. Just got a lot of music and video and the lark on there. Will take it to the shop tomorrow and ask them about getting the files.
A broken laptop and a reminder of my dislike for baked beans, rubbish lunch time 

[Gritlad]

Got the laptop back today and it works ok apart from video quality on both videos online (vimeo in HD) and playing ones from my SD card. Both are HD videos but the quality of the picture is log.
 Done some googling and checked drivers and graphics card are both updated.
Any help would be great, cheers
P.s . TomTom, the repair guy said the data on my old hard drive was unreadable and therefore they were not able to get the data off it. Does that mean its really broken or does it mean they are being lazy and want more money before they extract the files?
Again, thanks for any help.

[tomtom]

It might mean it's completely gone - or may be that they plugged it in and couldn't get it to work. (I suspect they didn't try too hard)

There are companies who will extract or try to extract data from this drive but they will charge. Maybe ask the repairers what they tried, and get a quote from one of the data recovery folk and find out if it's worth it?

[Obi-Wan is lost...]

There's a long thread/cautionary tale on this with all the knowledge

http://ukbouldering.com/board/index.php/topic,17678.0.html

Spilled beans on the keyboard is unlikely to kill a hard drive. Did it freeze on startup? If you have the drive and another PC you can download and run diagnostic tools which will tell you if its corrupt/dead/recoverable etc.

[lagerstarfish]

Spilled beans on the keyboard is unlikely to kill a hard drive.

I was about to point out that he probably meant that he dropped an unopened beans tin on the machine, which would damage the drive, but decided that such points are best left for Slackers

[SA Chris]

Sounds like a half baked idea to me.

[Gritlad]

Twas indeed a unopened tin of beans, not just a few escapee beans.

[Wood FT]

a) where was your laptop so that a tin of beans was allowed to gain such momentum as to critically damage your laptop?

b) hope dinner went alright

[B Diamond]

does sound like the weight/force of the drop has either bend the mechanism in the HDD or 'shocked' it.

Look into ghosting the HDD with another machine. There are specialists that you can send to, but of course depends on how much willing to pay to recover, how how secure your data needs to be.

Not everyone feels they want to send there data off to someone else.