Posted: 6/21/2007 12:38:05 PM EDT
|
Last night my laptop ground to a halt. I had 3 small apps running, and they just locked up. After several minutes, I rebooted the laptop. I got an error, something to the effect of 'can't read from the internal hard drive, press f1 to retry or f2 to enter setup'. This happened twice. I then walked away from the computer, vented for an hour, came back, and tried again. This time it booted normally, to my surprise. What happened, why, and should I expect it to happen again? 
|
I just bought it in March.  I'll have it backed up tomorrow...... |
 Sounds like it's time to call the manufacturer's tech support to get the hard drive or the whole laptop exchanged under warranty. After you do the backup and get rid of any private info on the laptop's HD of course. 
|
|
Question about backing up stuff on your HD: When you do a backup and your HD fails, what do you do or use to get the Operating system to work on the PC? How do you tell the computer to use another (good) HD instead of the bad HD, after it's failed? And what kind of backup software do you use, if any? Thanks, Merlin |
I'll do that this evening - thanks! As for cloning the drive, there's nothing on that drive that isn't on my desktop, but I appreciate the advice. |
After a failed drive, you need to swap it out with a good drive. As for the kind of software to use, it depends. If you have a chance to actually boot into the PC with the failing hard drive and had not backed up info beforehand, you can connect to the net and use an online email program (like gmail) and start emailing yourself files and keep them on the net till you get a good drive up and running. You could also use an online file storage service to do this. You can also ghost your whole hard drive to another using ghost software. If the drive does not work, there are live CDs that you can use to boot up from the CD and not even touch the hard drive. Then, from the CD operating system, you can access files on the hard drive and throw them online somewhere. Also, if you have a file server hooked up to your home network or networked PCs, you can transfer files that way. |
Sticking with my Norton Ghost example, it comes with a bootable CD so that you can restore HD images if you're in a situation where you have to restore the boot volume image. Otherwise, you backup and restore any other HD images (or specific files) while in Windows. |
|
Save your Data while you can. 90+% chance the drive is failing OR it could be loose in the laptop OR the controller in the laptop is crapping out..If you did not move or jiggle the laptop before the reboot in a way that might have caused the connections to make contact you more them likely have a dieing drive. Most laptops use a slip fit connection and not a cable like a desktop and the can work loose if you have a loose or missing screw. I manage an IT department that maintains units for a 100% laptop office of about 350. On average about 3 failed/failing drives a week. If you do the math the failure percentage in year is a little over 50%. We have also seen the failure rate increase as the size of the drives increase. They keep cramming more data into the same space and have lost the "fudge factor"/ error tolerance that was present on smaller drives. In other words, as far as disk drives are concerned, don't make'um like they used to. The capacity is have increased dramacticly and so has the failure rate. |
There is an old trick that computer repair peeps do. Try putting your HD in the freezer overnight, then booting. If the problems are heat-related, the cooling-off will fix it long enough to get your important data off the drive. Frequently, the probs are in the boot sector itself. After the computer boots, the apps work OK but when it warms up, the boot sector goes bad again. Best thing: back that baby up. |