[Zuerst]

I woke up this morning and used my laptop for about 30 seconds just fine and then it just froze. I have to cut the power and restart the damn thing but now it won't boot. Kept on giving me the "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key" message. I set the first boot device to the harddrive and 2nd to the optical/CD-ROM drive already. I took out the harddrive earlier and it seems something is loose inside when I shook it a little, is that just the needle thing inside? I thought of putting the Windows XP Pro CD in the CD-Rom drive and use that as the boot disc but I can't find my XP Pro CD. What can I do?

Is my harddrive physically broken? Is there anything I can do to recover the data on the drive? I just got an external harddrive to backup my drive and it fails right before I get the chance to do it?

 

[MrSlacker]

yeah it seems like its physically broken. try and find any bootable CD like Windows or you could try www.memtest86.com . Memtest checks your RAM, but it has a bootable CD or floppy that you can download. so download bootable ISO and burn it. see if you can boot on it.

 

[psychogentoo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zuerst I woke up this morning and used my laptop for about 30 seconds just fine and then it just froze. I have to cut the power and restart the damn thing but now it won't boot. Kept on giving me the "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key" message. I set the first boot device to the harddrive and 2nd to the optical/CD-ROM drive already. I took out the harddrive earlier and it seems something is loose inside when I shook it a little, is that just the needle thing inside? I thought of putting the Windows XP Pro CD in the CD-Rom drive and use that as the boot disc but I can't find my XP Pro CD. What can I do? Is my harddrive physically broken? Is there anything I can do to recover the data on the drive? I just got an external harddrive to backup my drive and it fails right before I get the chance to do it?

Oh the irony!!! So did you drop your laptop recently? Because from my experience hard drives don't generally fail in the middle of the operation (at least with ultra scsi drives we use in the production environment). Most of the time if it does fail, it is usually on start up...some times caused by a power failure, very rare but it has been known to happen when someone pushes the EPO button...big shiny red button...but I digress.

when you mentioned you had to "cut the power", was this just a hard reset or did you unplug both the battery and AC power in the middle of the freeze?

 

[lini]

Zuerst: Oh, I feel with you - that really sucks...

>Is my harddrive physically broken?

Can't tell for sure, but mechanical noise on mild shake rarely is a good sign. I only know a few drives for which such a noise would be normal.

>Is there anything I can do to recover the data on the drive?

Well, you could get an adaptor, connect the drive to another pc and see whether it is accessible there. But in case it is and the data structure turns out to be corrupted: Stop right there, if you are not familiar with such things! That means, you'd better not apply consumer data recovery tools directly to that drive, 'cause you might do more harm than good. You could still try some of these, however, just not on the damaged drive - instead you should create an image of the drive on another drive and apply the recovery tool to the image drive only.

In case the data is really valuable, there are professional data recovery services with almost miraculous capabilities - these are everything but cheap, though.

Greetings from Hannover!

Manfred / lini

P.S.: As another possibility, just the electronics of the drive could be damaged. This is much better than a mechanical failure, 'cause in such cases the manufacturer (or one of those pro data recovery services) often enough can replace the electronics board and bring your data back to life completely or with only minimal loss...

 

[gsferrari]

get a Knoppix linux or any other "LIVE" edition linux CD from a friends cd burner (or if you have another pc) and use it to boot up the system. You may be able to run a few diagnostics afterwards.

 

[gpalmer]

It sounds like what happened (hopefully) is that the computer wrote over your boot sector while crashing. I would try getting a copy of fdisk and try the command line:

fdisk /mbr

This will replace your boot sector without changing anything else. Make sure you don't forget the /mbr or the results will be most unhappy!

 

[Bill Ward]

Quote:

Originally Posted by gpalmer It sounds like what happened (hopefully) is that the computer wrote over your boot sector while crashing. I would try getting a copy of fdisk and try the command line: fdisk /mbr This will replace your boot sector without changing anything else. Make sure you don't forget the /mbr or the results will be most unhappy!

Is that going to be valid with the NTFS in XP Pro?

BW

 

[r3cc0s]

What kind of computer
Some are prone to overhead (immediatley) as the cpu runs full core speed during intial bootup

this has been primarily occuringon emachines and their sister puters

 

[BlindTiger]

My T20 is on it's last leg, it's been overheating for over a week now.
it's a common problem with IBM's as I've soon found out on the net.
I've tried putting arctic silver on the cpu and it overheats.
when playing a dvd it goes from 48c to 80+c, sometimes the cpu slows down and sometimes it just freezes and sometimes it shuts off.
I use mobile meter to monitor it's temp.
edit, I just powered up my t20, and it happened again, overheated and shut down. I think their heatsink to cpu contact sucks and their heat pipe sucks too.

 

[Zuerst]

I have an Asus M3000N and had it for about 2 years. I found a Windows 2000 Pro CD and used that to boot up the laptop but it says "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer." Maybe the connector is bad? What type of connector/adopter do I need to connect a laptop harddrive to a desktop harddrive? Or a connector that'll connect the laptop harddrive to the laptop just to make sure the connector/adopter is working? Hopefully I can find my XP Pro CD though...

EDIT: While trying to boot up with the Windows 2000 Pro CD in drive it gave "Couldn't open the boot parition to check for a signature" message... What does that mean?

Quote:

Originally Posted by gpalmer It sounds like what happened (hopefully) is that the computer wrote over your boot sector while crashing. I would try getting a copy of fdisk and try the command line: fdisk /mbr This will replace your boot sector without changing anything else. Make sure you don't forget the /mbr or the results will be most unhappy!

How do I get to a point that I can use Fdisk?

EDIT: Found the XP Pro disk and it too says that "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer"... I guess it's a bad connector? or the harddrive just not powering up at all? What type of connector do I need to connect this laptop harddrive to a desktop one as a slave drive?

Thanks,

 

[MrSlacker]

yeah that says that HDD is not there. open up your laptop and see if HDD is connected all the way. you can get one of these to connect your HDD to desktop