Ok all you computer buffs :)
Daughters Acer laptop windows 7, the one I spent far too much money on the other week getting all the viruses off, has just gone belly up. I've been pratting about for hours. Basically it gets as far as a grey screen with a cursor. Thats it. I've tried all the methods of starting including Safe Mode and booting from a the recovery disc. Thing just sits there with the blue circle of death except one time it came up with Acer Disc Management but only gave the option to re format, not repair.
So being the mechanic I am I thought I would go down the loose hard drive connection route, tried that - no joy. Then flash of inspiration there is an old Vista laptop kicking about so I whipped out the hardrive and swapped it out (as they say in the States) and bingo the thing works :) except its got all the stuff on that was on the old laptop, document wise. So I'm guessing the original hard drive is toast.
Now I can source another hard drive and fit. So far so good.
Now this is where my computer illiteracy kicks in. Is all the operating system and application, documents, photos, music etc on the toast hard drive or is it sat on a memory card? Where do I go from here to reinstate or get up and running again?
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>> Is all the operating system and application, documents, photos, music etc on the toast hard drive or is it sat on a memory card?
The former - the toast drive. Hence when you tried the other drive, you saw the contents of that one, operating system and all.
>> Where do I go from here
There are people out there who claim to be able to retrieve files from duff hard drives, even deleted stuff. Hopefully someone more clever than me (shouldn't be hard) will be along shortly to advise further.
Last edited by: VxFan on Sat 28 Mar 15 at 21:14
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Superficially there's some similarity to problems I outlined in this thread:
www.car4play.com/forum/post/index.htm?t=10938&m=337330#337330
Basically boot into Linux from an optical drive (presume a USB device would have same functionality in a lappy w/out DVD etc) and then 'mount'/access the drive that was refusing to open Windoze.
Linux versions will have moved on since then and perhaps one of the experts can suggest something more up to date than the Ubuntu I was pointed to there.
It did though allow me (twice) to access the data sections of an otherwise defunct disc and recover content.
I subsequently inherited the dodgy PB machine and have used it for last yr or so.
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>> Now I can source another hard drive and fit. So far so good.
>> Now this is where my computer illiteracy kicks in. Is all the operating system and
>> application, documents, photos, music etc on the toast hard drive or is it sat on
>> a memory card?
On the hard drive. It may be completely burned toast, but usually they are only slightly burned - unfortunately your toast has burned crust.
Probably, you have lost your boot sector on the drive so a computer can't recognise it as a bootable disk, or possibly even as a disk at all. All the stuff is there, but can't be seen. If you don't have any recovery CDs with the computer then your recovery partition (contains the operating systems and drivers) is there as well. Doubtful you can see that either. So you will need a new disk, new operating system install cd (windows I guess) and then you will probably have to install some drivers once you have the thing loaded. You wont need to buy a new OS - you have the license key attached to your pc somewhere, so borrow one.
You can then take your old disk, buy a caddy, stick it in there and see if one of numerous programs you can download from the net, can find the data. Worse case is that the toast is burned all over and there is no white bread at all.
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Thanks Z. I have 5 recovery discs which I created when the laptop was new. Will these contain the OS and divers to get me started after I have inserted the new hardrive? If so is it a case of installing new HD, and then booting from Recover Disc number 1? Thanks so far.
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>> Thanks Z. I have 5 recovery discs which I created when the laptop was new.
>> Will these contain the OS and divers to get me started after I have inserted
>> the new hardrive? If so is it a case of installing new HD, and then
>> booting from Recover Disc number 1? Thanks so far.
Should be the way to go.
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HD and caddy now on order should be here Monday :)
Kin computers :(
Last edited by: Fullchat on Sat 28 Mar 15 at 23:09
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Don't they make life easy. :-0)
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You've been put well on the track to (potentially) fixing the problem, so I hope I'm not muddying the waters.
I find it useful to have a comprehensive set of DOS-based diagnostics available on an external bootable drive (e.g. either CD or USB Key).
If you have issues such as you are experiencing, it helps to confirm the diagnosis (in your case, potential HDD failure).
I tend to use the bootable image from:
www.ultimatebootcd.com/
....either burned to CD, or created on a USB key using the instructions referenced there.
In the case of HDD failure, there are diagnostics from most of the major disk manufacturers that can be run to confirm the position (The Windows CHKDSK facility, if Windows is available, will often report everything OK when it isn't).
The other tools, such as memory testing, can also be useful.
FWIW, in the past with a failure to boot into Windows, (unable to read sectors with some system files on) I've managed to recover by using the manufacturer's diagnostics to "repair" the bad sectors (which gave a successful boot), rapidly cloned the disk to a new one, and then run system file checker etc. to repair any possible system file damage.
You DO have to be pretty lucky with the nature of the failure for this to work, but it recovers as much of the existing configuration as is possible.
You have my sympathy - I've just had an Acer laptop fail after 6 weeks of use with HDD failure. It's being replaced under warranty, and luckily, I run regular automated backups to a NAS drive, so there's little loss of user data. (Just rather a lot of work re-configuring the new PC to match the old one).
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After many long hours and most of my midnight oil burnt I have come out of the other end after lots of shots in the dark.
As suggested I sourced a new HD and external caddy. Plugged in the caddy and ran a freeware partition recovery tool - zilch.
Then I had the idea of trying to create a virtual computer on a different laptop using Paragon and VM Ware. Lots of data transferred across but I was not successful probably due to the instructions being in computerspeak.
Had another look inside the duff HD and spotted the 'Users' folder, clicked on that and voila everything was there. So whether it was there all along and I did not spot it or I have done something to spark up the old HD, I dunno. What matters is I've managed to retrieve documents, images etc.
Biggest pain is crunching through nearly 200 updates and reinstalling Applications, printer software etc.
But its done. Thanks for all the advice. :)
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>> Had another look inside the duff HD and spotted the 'Users' folder, clicked on that
>> and voila everything was there. So whether it was there all along and I did
>> not spot it or I have done something to spark up the old HD, I
>> dunno.
That seems fairly common scenario, similar to my using Ubuntu to access 'dead' drive.
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Laptop Hardrive - VxFan
