Dead Laptop

[paulc]

A mate of mine has packard bell laptop which is about 3 years old. It has been having a few problems in recent weeks (run tim errors etc) but tonight it just had a blue screen with a lot of errors messages. It was unresponsive to any keyboard command so the only option was to turn it off. On start up it no longer fires up windows and just has the message "operating system not found" Have tried to boot up in safe mode but no luck with this either. I suspect the hard drive has suffered a mechanical failure of some sort but any other suggestions would be appreciated - particularly if there is a chance of getting any data off the hard disk.

[Background Noise]

Not sure about getting the disk to boot again - it may be windows 'repairable' - but you might want to remove the hard disc and connect it to another computer as an external drive and recover the data first.

[paulc]

many thanks - will have to give that a try

[Lancelot37]

I had an odd fault on my desktop recently and couldn't get it to do anything. I was advised to disconnect the power supply from the tower. (Not just switch it off) Press the start button for 10 seconds, then connect the power supply and start up. It worked. I was certain that I'd had a hard disc failure, but it wasn't.

For a laptop similar to the above but remove the battery completely and press the start button for 10 seconds.

In over 20 years of computing I've never heard of the above but it worked.

[MacBoero]

Sounds like a classic hard drive failure to me.

Typically as the spindle bearing wears out, or the spindle drive starts to fail or malfunction, the drive is either unable to maintain accurate alignment of the head to the magnetic tracks, or the spindle speed starts to fluctuate too much.

You start to get bad sectors appearing, and the moment you get a bad sector in a critical area, i.e. the part of the drive storing the operating system, boot sectors, registry or the file allocation table, that is when you find the system no longer boots.

Corrupted sectors in the boot sectors typically give the error you are seeing, errors other areas of the drive usually result in blue screen, or the machine simply locking up during boot up.

As already suggested, connected the drive as an external drive to another machine, may give you an opportunity to retrieve some data. If you have corruption in the FAT, this can result in only partial recovery of files though.

I would certainly consider replacing the drive, as re-formatting and doing a windows install, usually only works for short time, before corrupted sectors start appearing again.

[Sprogget]

Stick it in the freezer for an hour, fire it up, whip the data off it pronto, rebuild it with a new drive. Assuming it fires up that is..

[johngreen]

I have witnessed remarkable recoveries from the 10 second button holding practice outlined above but suspect that the desired effect materialises not from the physical act so much as from the simultaneous verbal servings that, depending on one’s faith or lack of it, may include pleas or promises to assorted deities or hugely violent and anti social threats combining extremely bad language with myriad descriptive effects that might be bought to bear upon malfunctioning silicon based gizmos through the application of large boots, hammers, high voltages, flaming infernos, buckets of acid etc etc.

My most personal outstanding achievement in this respect was repeatedly convincing an HP laser printer to function when it clearly had other ideas.

Needless to say, the day eventually came when, having failed me for the umpteenth time - and as usual at a somewhat critical moment - I found myself overwhelmed by an obligation to prove to the combined electronic equipment present and slyly observing that my words were not just bluff.

Throwing said printer to the floor, I proceeded to jump up and down on it a few times before dragging its much misaligned and toner stained carcass by its cables out of my apartment and down the stairs while giving it a very stern talking to indeed, finally dropping it in the bin like a large dead rat with a dusting off of hands and a most pointed ‘Thanks for nothing’ goodbye.

I never had a single bit of trouble from any of the equipment that witnessed this act from that day on until it was all finally retired from use.
Somewhat surprisingly I can also report that the printer itself has functioned perfectly thereafter and I am certain will continue to do so for some years yet.
But this is in its later life purpose; as a splodge of toxic landfill rather than as a device for leaving meaningful black marks on sheets of crisp white paper….