The Lad's 9 month old Packard Bell laptop (Win7 64bit) has died. A few odd messages yesterday, today next to nothing. Switch on and after the BIOS screen it offers a choice of Normal start or Recovery start. Normal start leads to the Windows logo and then a flash of BSOD and shut down. Recovery start eventually goes to a 'blue sky' screen with mose pad active but no further. Cannot get into BIOS settings (ie to change boot drive) neither can I get it to offer a start in safe mode.
Virus or hard drive failure? FWIW he's admitted to visiting porn sites.
Priority is to recover data - mainly music from Amazon MP3 store - that's not backed up There are a set of recovery discs but I suspect these will wipe the C Drive.
I'm thinking in terms of creating a bootable CD in another OS (Linux?) so as to navigate the drive or, presumably at the cost of voiding the warranty, getting the HDD in a caddy and seeing if it's readable that way.
Has anybody any similar experiences or advice
|
|
you have the right idea, bootable linux cd (one of the "forensic" distros is good for this) USb stick, mount PC drive, Mount USB drive copy stuff from one t'other. Then whatever recovery method came with the PC.
|
|
Thanks Z, can you recommend a 'forensic' distro - caution though, I've never used Linux before. Was one of those going to do things for early retirement that's not arrived yet!!
|
Update,
Booting into Ubuntu now. Bit of a learning curve about imaging ISO files and the PB's BIOS to change the boot order is hit/miss!!
|
|
Thanks again Z. Now got the music & films, 55GB in all, on a portable drive and transferring to NAS. Need to get his 6th form coursework over as well then job's done and we can see if the restore discs work.
|
Test the hard drive before trying to restore it, the laptop is 9 months old and that is pretty good going for a laptop hard drive!! I am not joking either.
Got two laptops on the bench right now needing new drives, both are Core 2's.
|
"laptop is 9 months old and that is pretty good going for a laptop hard drive"
You must have very rough customers sup there - I've "been around" thousands of laptops over the past few years (in work) and the failure rate isn't very high at all.
|
Rattle's customers must indeed handle laptops badly. Laptop 2.5" IDE drives are designed to be pretty resilient. And many laptops these days shutdown the hard drive if it detects the laptop has been dropped.
I've had laptops from work and had them for near to 4 years. And they get thrown into the car etc in a laptop rucksack etc.
I'll wager the problem with the laptop is a virus - and Bromptonaut knows the likely source too.
The fact he's copying over 50Gb off this drives suggests the drive is working to me. If it didn't boot due to a problem with the drive then he'd not be able to copy file off it.
Last edited by: rtj70 on Sun 17 Jun 12 at 19:56
|
They are mostly bad sectors but lots of bad sectors so its not worth doing anything other than replacing the drives. Complete failures are rare but by far the most common item us techs replace is the hard drive (source: the IT tech forum I am a member of).
Bad sectors can damage operating systems files and stop windows from booting, yet all the data can be copied fine.
A classic is example is recently a system kept hanging on loading windows. I did a surface scan 100's of bad sectors were found. SMART shows up lots of errors yet I simply cloned the drive, ran CHKDSK, rewrote the MBR and boot sector and it booted perfectly.
Also the laptop design has a big impact, cheaper laptops have much poorer shock protection for the drive, they are just slowly screwed in.
I would also say that laptop hard drives are much more likely to fail than desktop drives but that might be simply because there are now a lot more people with laptops than desktops!.
Don't see that many viruses these days but when do I come across them are always very nasty.
Don't forget all the laptops I see are the faulty ones too, which will skew the results. I am sure the rate probably isn't that high, but I do see a lot of drives with faults on them more than any other laptop fault.
Also come across quite a few laptops under warranty with dying drives although it not that common. Put it this way though, I've already replaced three laptop hard drives under my own warranty this year :(. E.g I replace a drive, 6 months later it fails, so I replace it under warranty.
Last edited by: RattleandSmoke on Sun 17 Jun 12 at 21:55
|
The Laptop gets taken into school occasionally so may have been subject to rough handling but not recently as he's been on exam leave.
Over nigh on 20 yrs of computer ownership, 5 desktops and seven laptops between Mrs B, me and kids, I've seen two HDD failures (if this is one). Other was on a desktop and was naffed to point of being unreadable in a caddy. That was the Lad's too.
Will mess about with some diagnostics this evening. Got to wrest machine off him though - he seemed quite happy FB'ing etc on Linux/Firefox last night.
|
I've not had any complete failures (touch wood) but have had a couple which were in urgent need of replacing.
Broke on my portable externals by dropping it by just 1 foot, now all it does is click click click.
|
>> Cannot get into BIOS settings
>> (ie to change boot drive) neither can I get it to offer a start in
>> safe mode.
Tapping F8 all through boot up usually still brings up the option to enter Safe Mode. In Windows 7 fortunately the USB sockets are still usable in Safe Mode for taking data off the hard disk. If it's 9 months old I take it is still under warranty?
|
>>If it's 9 months old I take it is
>> still under warranty?
It is. I just need to run some disc utilities and an AV scan to determine if it's physically naffed or badly infected. Cannot expect the warranty to cover the latter!!
Last edited by: Bromptonaut on Mon 18 Jun 12 at 12:18
|
Once you know you have safely got your data off, try rebuilding it with the recovery disks. If it's just a virus then it will work. After you've rebuilt it then run diagnostics etc on it. I'd not waste too much time on it before ruling out the virus angle.
It clearly runs a LiveCD of Linux so the laptop itself is working okay.
|
Realised I never closed this one.
Seemed to be no method of accessing or completely wiping the C drive using windows. Couldn't access it from a caddy neither would fdisk work as it should.
Final solution was to wipe the drive via a full install of ubuntu onto the HDD. After that the windows recovery discs loaded and ran in their proper sequence. Now seems AoK again - until the next time he goes on porn sites.
Last edited by: Bromptonaut on Tue 17 Jul 12 at 12:51
|
The damn thing's died again.
This time it's definitely the hard drive. Caddied it and ran check disc which failed due bad sectors.
Data recovered again via Ubuntu but lost his pictures 'cos the silly s*d didn't open and check the recovered copy - it was just a short cut. Lesson learned hopefully
Disc was a SATA 320 GB Hitachi Z5K320 Travelstar. Am I right in thinking that 2.5inch SATA discs are reasonably generic and that I can replace it with the WD model on offer in MAplin?
Also, are there any restrictions on size etc the OS (WIn7/64) might recognise? I'm thinking in terms of installing 500GB. Am I likely to have any problems re-installing the OS from recovery discs following an HDD change?
Thanks in anticipation
Simon
|
>> Also, are there any restrictions on size etc the OS (WIn7/64) might recognise? I'm thinking
>> in terms of installing 500GB. Am I likely to have any problems re-installing the OS
>> from recovery discs following an HDD change?
No OS restrictions, might be a BIOS restriction but highly unlikely if you are not over ambitious and stick with your upgrade choice of 500mb.
Recovery disks? depends on how they have done them, probably no problem, but it *might* just might, want to format to a 320gb primary partition. No problem if it does you just format the rest to a secondary partition with a different drive letter.
|
|
With W7 extending the primary partition is easy, so in the event it does want to argue the size, just let it and sort it out after.
|
|
Thanks Z and Mark. That's as I hoped it would be.
|
|
New drive installed and formatted. Files now loading from PB restore discs.
|
>> New drive installed and formatted. Files now loading from PB restore discs.
And then it all went quiet........
|
Now running in Windows with MSE downloaded and kit returned to custody of 'user'.
Next install will be I-Tunes then restore music in gaps between him being absorbed in R2's Pink Floyd night. Suggested CCleaner and a blitz on bloatware that's re-installed itself was a priority but you can't tell 18yo lads nuffink.
Shout of 'Daaad' awaited.
|
Dead Laptop - Zero
