Comments | san_grail: Laptop

san_grail

Laptop - Can we fix it?

Mar 05, 2009 11:59

Flatmate's laptop went on the fritz the other night.
Something about having the printer plugged in, turning it off and pulling the plug, then it not starting up next time round.

[Edit: - Now with more details of just how borked it is!It starts booting up from the BIOS normally, says there's been a serious error, offers you Safe Mode / no Safe ( Read more... )

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rodgerd March 5 2009, 07:29:42 UTC

Performing filesystem operations on a machine with fritzed hardware is a really, really unwise thing to do. If the thing that's fritzed turns out to be any of cabline, IDE controller, CPU, or memory, you could easily end up with a more heavily corrupted filesystem.

Your best first step is to whip the drive out of the laptop, stick it in a 2.5" drive <-> USB case (I have one if you want to borrow it for a few days), copy all the data off somewhere safe, and then try diagnosing/repairing. As part of that step, if your flatmate has anything on the drive he'd rather the repair shop not see, he can remove it once there's a safe backup (or two).

For a very basic hardware checker you could try booting a CD with memcheck86 on it; that will only cover the CPU + RAM, but will at least give you a starting point. If you grab it on something like a gparted CD image you can boot into Linux and see if the system stays up for any length of time, although continual bluescreens suggest a hardware problem.

rodgerd March 5 2009, 07:30:23 UTC

Also, I don't have a high opinion of PB.

hesperus March 5 2009, 08:21:42 UTC

Do what Rodger says here, put the hard disk back in the computer, and then reinstall a fresh copy of windows from your CD.

hesperus March 5 2009, 08:27:36 UTC

You used to work there too? ;) I was there 09/99-09/01.

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hesperus March 5 2009, 08:35:45 UTC

yeah, that's what I thought too. :D

I've been told by a couple of people that the underlying company keeps going bankrupt and being reestablished, although that could just be rumour.

rodgerd March 6 2009, 05:27:19 UTC

When they were around the corner on Cambridge Terrace (there's a Chinese grocer there now, I think), they went broke at least a couple of times and came back under the same name & logo.

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