A coworker gave me her computer to work on (She let her kids play with it ). I turned it on and it cannot find it's C:\ drive.I have a repair DISK and a windows 8 disk that I have tried. I can't SEE any physical damage to the machine. I can run the CD- ROM and can find the RAM. I think (don't know) that her 3 year old figured out how to format the C drive. However, there are no PARTITIONS, data, or any of the other wonderful "mental guts" registering that can normally be found on a hard drive.What CDRom DISCS do you have in your arsenal ? ?
DLoad and burn a Hiren's boot CD .iso...it has many tools on it.
To burn an .iso properly i suggest IMGBurn...also Free.
This will create a bootable CD with Utilities you can use to check the status of the HDD and it's contents.

1st Utility to run would be the HDD manuf. diagnostics...let it run to completion.
Then use Total Commander from the file system tool section...it's a DOS based interface but it'll show you what data ...if any is left one the HDD...

Best of Luck.Hi

I have just watched this U tube video and what do I see but the laptop as a Toshiba hard drive. Oh dear we have a lot of these drives stop dead , no motor spin. It is fixable but only to get the data back but not for further use. If there is no data that is important on the drive you will need to replace it . And reload windows. SORRY

Lisa_maree
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9jevlInqrULet's wait and see if there is data on it from above before we declare the HDD "dead"...
It was stated that there had been kids playing on it.