Computer help.. Crashed hard disk...

[vkurup]

So my laptop is knackered... It boots up and then goes into a "Startup system is repairing your system"...


It ran for about 3 days and never got thru that cycles. I had my doubts about it, finally got around to find my old HP utilities CD.
Booted it from the CD and ran diagnostics. As I feared, the HDD is fried..




Unfortunately, had not backed it up, so might end up losing a lot of important stuff.. Any thoughts on what can be done..

 

[PhilTheFragger]

Go to Maplin, buy a USB hard drive caddy that will take a laptop sata hard drive. should cost you about £15

Remove the hard drive from the laptop and put it in the caddy plugging in the cables

Plug it into another windows PC and hopefully it will show up in my computer and you will be able to navigate to your stuff and save it off,


If it doesnt work, then it is likely that the drive is physically knackered any your only hope there is a professional data recovery lab, they are very good, but very expensive, be prepared to shelve out £500+

While you are at it. buy an external drive to back up your stuff in the future

 

[vkurup]

Thanks Phil... I used to have a network HDD backup, but did not set it up after we moved house last Dec. I was going to back things up before Xmas as had been mad busy at work. I do think a few sectors are fried....

I was going to get a new W10 this boxing day, but ....

 

[vkurup]

Phil... just bought a caddy off Amazon for about 7 quid. should be here tomorrow, so no wasted time on this one.

Another question: Is there a simple way of getting a new HDD for the lappy? I was planning to get a new laptop itself, but other than the hdd, the other bits look alright at the moment. I have the original W7 CDs which came with the Dell, so can reinstall it. Do I need specialist help to change hdd. I m also thinking of putting a solid state rather than than standard HDD..

 

[PhilTheFragger]

Defo go the SSD route
buy this http://www.ebuyer.com/695890-samsung-850-evo-250gb-2-5inch-ssd-mz-75e250bw

its £80 for a 256Gb SSD drive , BUT Dont get it if you have 300Gb of photos/music/videos

No special tools needed apart from the same tools you used to take out the old hard drive, it should just slot in, but some have a support cage around them, just transplant it.
boot up and load your windows 7 disc and away you go

Shout back if a problem

 

[Rooter]

its £80 for a 256Gb SSD drive , BUT Dont get it if you have 300Gb of photos/music/videos

Agree with phil 100% but i will say, YES buy the 256GB, for operations thats ample! Keep stuff like photo's stored on your NAS and back that up to the cloud! Back up your lappy every week/month to the NAS, then cloud or even DVD backup the pics.

(says the man that has lost daughter #2 newborn pictures...)

 

[vkurup]

Agree with phil 100% but i will say, YES buy the 256GB, for operations thats ample! Keep stuff like photo's stored on your NAS and back that up to the cloud! Back up your lappy every week/month to the NAS, then cloud or even DVD backup the pics.

(says the man that has lost daughter #2 newborn pictures...)

Thats alright, i have lost the Mrs 5 years worth of MSc work and final dissertation .... Dog house would be a luxury if I cant restore things..

 

[vkurup]

Phil, A friend mentioned that the SSDs have a fixed and shorter life as compared to HDD. Had a quick look at the techcrunch reviews of the Samsung is one and it talks of low transfer rate for old data. BTW there is a Pro version too at about 95 quid.. Any good.

 

[Foxholer]

My laptop HDD pretty much died a couple of weeks back - OS spat out messages that it was about to fail! I got it cloned to a new one, even though it was apparently in a pretty poor state, by a local (computer) shop. Total cost for the replacement and clone was £80, so pricey, but not incredibly so!

Backup drive is on the list of near-future purchases, though not at the top!

 

[vkurup]

Phil,
Need you help... got the Samsung SDD and put it in... my assumption is that the SDD is blank.





As I dont have any other home PC, I booted it up with my old Dell W7 installer that came with my lappy.



I booted up via the CD drive rather than SDD and after about 6-7 mins of whirring around, it spits the following error "0xc00000e9 unexpected i/o error has occurred"



After the event i looked at the instructions that came with the SDD, it talks about putting the SDD in a caddy and connecting with a laptop and then copying things over using the Samsung software. But how does one change the HDD to SDD if you dont have a working machine? Is it possible that the machine is expecting a 500GB Seagate HDD and now finding a Samsung SDD??? Do i need to change any BIOS settings??

 

[PhilTheFragger]

I never bother with the software that comes with the SSD,
I do exactly what you have done, mount the SSD then boot from the recovery CD, it should load windows straight onto the SSD

Try this

have the CD already in the tray.

Switch on and IMMEDIATELY tap F12, tap tap tap
a menu screen comes up, select the dvd drive and follow it through

any better?

 

[vkurup]

I never bother with the software that comes with the SSD,
I do exactly what you have done, mount the SSD then boot from the recovery CD, it should load windows straight onto the SSD

Try this

have the CD already in the tray.

Switch on and IMMEDIATELY tap F12, tap tap tap
a menu screen comes up, select the dvd drive and follow it through

any better?

Good answer :

Let me do it now and get back to you.. I had changed the bios setting to boot from DVD, so i think it is doing that, but will go down the F12 option..

Update to follow soon

 

[vkurup]

Fix one thing and something else will go AWOL... bloody computers

 

[PhilTheFragger]

Is it a desktop?
have you plugged the vga cable into the dedicated graphics card or the one on the motherboard, i bet you need to swap the cable

 

[PhilTheFragger]

You did plug the hard drive in didnt you?

Just checking

 

[vkurup]

You did plug the hard drive in didnt you?

Just checking

Mr Clever sausage.. Good Q... yes i did..

Had a look in the Setup and it shows the Samsung SSD in there.
so did some troubleshooting and i realised that it was bypassing the CD...

After a few tries, have finally got it to recoganise the installer in the CD... now it has been sitting there with 'Windows is loading files' for the past 20 mins.. atleast something is happening.

 

[PhilTheFragger]

Cool n groovy

shout if you need me

 

[vkurup]

Cool n groovy

shout if you need me

I am sure I will have to... its been at 'Windows is loading Files' for a long time... but I am not going to rock it... happy to leave it overnight if needed...
But I would have thought that it would have been faster as there is nothing else going on.. (BTW, i m not sure how good my CD drive is.. not been used for a couple of years).. is there a way i can create a bootable USB with the Dell CD?

 

[vkurup]

I think the CD drive is also on the blink... it spins for a first few mins and starts the 'windows is loading files' and then you can hear the CD die and no longer spinning..
Ran Diagnostics for CD ROM and the test come up as Pass!!!

this is frustrating..

 

[vkurup]

Phil... No luck with it... it sat there at 'windows is loading files' and did nothing else. I dont know if it is a drive issue or a CD issue. I had another Dell diagnostics CD and it seemed to run that alright - albeit with a lot of humming and whirring.

Is there a way I can create a boot up USB drive or something? The machine is out of warrenty so i am not sure if Dell is going to help on this one, but I can try. Thoughts on a postcard.