Posted: 10/26/2011 8:28:20 PM EDT
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My daughters Dell Laptop has crashed. wont boot up at all..
Any ideas, windows 7 18months old. no boot disc. ? Baby pics on the HD want to save without dumpin a new in..? |
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Does it show any signs of power? Do any of the status LEDs light up when powered on? Does it show the boot screen? Does it make any sounds? Fan noise, beeps, hard disk clicking? Basic troubleshooting: Verify AC adapter is functional with multimeter. Remove battery from laptop. Check for bulging or burn marks. Set aside. Unplug AC adapter from laptop. With battery removed, hold down power button for 10-20 seconds. Plug in AC adapter. Try to power on. We need more details |
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Yep It has power.
Chager and led's are lit. Comes up an starts Status Repair. and continues over and over Safe mode will do the same thing Critical Disc Error and run and run the repair module for disk Errors but no avail. Inspiron 1525, WIndows vista, Hard Disc led is lit and accesing Start Up Repair in progress. First and Third LED stay lit. second led lits up when accessing the HD restart back to Startup Repair. |
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Option 1: Boot the laptop with a Linux live CD or USB. There are various distros available on the net. Recover important files off of hard drive onto USB flash drive. Scan hard disk for errors using hard drive manufacturer-specific scanning program. Or if available, use the one built into the Dell BIOS. If clean bill of health, use recovery partition or supplied recovery CDs to re-image the hard disk to factory condition. If the scan comes back with any errors, replace the hard disk. Option 2: Remove the hard disk from the laptop. http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/ins1525/en/SM/hdd.htm#wp1180023 Remove the cage from the hard disk. Purchase a 2.5" SATA external USB hard disk enclosure. Put hard disk into said enclosure and connect to another computer. Recover important files. Scan hard disk for errors using hard drive manufacturer-specific scanning program. If clean bill of health, put hard disk back into laptop and use recovery partition or supplied recovery CDs to re-image the hard disk to factory condition. If the scan comes back with any errors, replace the hard disk. Check if you purchased an extended warranty for the laptop. If you did, you can save yourself the cost of the new hard disk. Most of the time, data recovery/backup service is not covered by the warranty. |
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Quoted: There's an old tech fix that may work: Refrigerate the compute for a couple of hours, then boot. Sometimes if the HD moving parts are just a bit out of spec, cooling them will make them work just enough to boot one last time. Then save all. Very very bad idea. I would do this as a last ditch effort for a hard drive, but not for an entire computer. Melting condensation inside the computer could make the OP's problem even worse. As in instead of just needing a new hard drive he would have to replace the whole computer. |
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Quoted: There's an old tech fix that may work: Refrigerate the compute for a couple of hours, then boot. Sometimes if the HD moving parts are just a bit out of spec, cooling them will make them work just enough to boot one last time. Then save all. doesn't seem like a hardware problem, but borked windows. |
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Quoted:
Quoted:
There's an old tech fix that may work: Refrigerate the compute for a couple of hours, then boot. Sometimes if the HD moving parts are just a bit out of spec, cooling them will make them work just enough to boot one last time. Then save all. Very very bad idea. I would do this as a last ditch effort for a hard drive, but not for an entire computer. Melting condensation inside the computer could make the OP's problem even worse. As in instead of just needing a new hard drive he would have to replace the whole computer. thanks for the PSA. Srsly. I hadn't thot of condensation inside the case. |
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Quoted:
Yep It has power. Chager and led's are lit. Comes up an starts Status Repair. and continues over and over Safe mode will do the same thing Critical Disc Error and run and run the repair module for disk Errors but no avail. Inspiron 1525, WIndows vista, Hard Disc led is lit and accesing Start Up Repair in progress. First and Third LED stay lit. second led lits up when accessing the HD restart back to Startup Repair. Critical Disc Error points to a hard drive probably about to take a dump. Take the hard drive out of the laptop. Put the hard drive in a Ziploc bag and put in the freezer for a few days. Take the hard drive out of the freezer and Ziploc bag, put inside a 2.5" external enclosure. Hook up to another computer. Pull files off of hard drive. I had a similar problem last week. User didn't have any recovery discs, and SpinRite was saying that the hard drive was in "imminent danger of complete failure". I could hear the hard drive cllcking, and knew that it wasn't a good sound to hear. I decided to go all out, and attempt to clone her hard drive before it completely crapped out, in order to save her the cost of a new OS. Froze her hard drive for several days, then put her hard drive in an external enclosure, and then inside a Ziploc bag. Took some soft-bodied ice packs, and wrapped them around the enclosure. Cloned the drive to 64% before I started having read errors. Swapped out the ice packs, and after a few more errors, data was transferring again and I was able to pull the remaining data off of her laptop. Once I ran chkdsk /f and fixed the Master Boot Record, I was able to log into her laptop. It's running behind me right now.  Once I'm finished installing updates, it can go back to her.
Good luck! |
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Go get a USB-SATA cable. Take the HD out and give that a try FIRST. If you get what you need put the HD back in an call for warranty replacement. Nothing you do will every make this HD right again. It's already broke. Even if you get Windows to boot again the drive needs to be replaced.
If you can't get the files you want go get a utility like spinrite and give that a try. If you get your files call for a HD replacement Now we get to the desperate measures: If the above don't work you can try replacing the circuit board on the bottom of the HD with an identical one from an IDENTICAL drive if you can find one. Good luck. We can do this at work because we hardly ever buy just one of anything. Usually we have dozens of the same drives. You could try the freezer trick but that will more likely work on a drive with different issue. Don't freeze the entire laptop. Freeze just the HD. Get it in the laptop and get your shit off quick. A laptop is a terrible place to keep stuff. They get stolen. They break. At least use a USB external at home. |
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Backups. You need them.
With the low cost of large drives these days there isn't a reason someone should operate a computer without an offsite backup, much less one onsite. Try to put a value on the data that you can't reproduce (pictures and movies). Now quantify that with a $100-$200 investment to secure against the loss of that data because of a hardware failure. My personal backup solution is keeping the working files on my computer in a RAID5 array. I also keep a single external hard drive on site that is a mirror of the RAID5 array. That external drive gets moved to my workplace weekly, where I store it and bring home an identical external drive (which now contains data that hasn't been synchronized since last week). I perform the synchronization and keep it on site for a week. Rinse, repeat. This gives me a partially redundant store of data within the computer as well as two copies, one on site and one off site. In the worst case scenario, I will only have a vulnerability of losing anything that has accumulated in the past week. I know this is a bit off topic for the OP, but if you have a solid backup plan and you execute it, replacing a failing hard drive becomes trivial. *** A side note about my solution. I don't backup my OS installation. This solution is only used to backup my personal data, not the entire installation. In the event of an OS failure, I will simply need to reinstall the OS and my applications. I will then be able to restore all of my personal data. |