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... )

Comments 9

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san_grail March 4 2009, 23:30:51 UTC

Ah, sorry - I didn't expound enough.

Checked Safe Mode, same dealio - actually I didn't have to check it.
It's bad enough that each time it starts up it's all *squawk!* Serious system error! Wanna try Safe Mode? Oops, that doesn't work...

I'm more bothered that the windows install cd isn't recognising that there's already a windows install on there. That says somewhat borked to me...

Any recommendations for 'We come to you' people though? I know someone working for... Geek Squad or whatever, but they're down in Christchurch right now.

bekitty March 4 2009, 23:15:42 UTC

Here's the thread on wellingtonnz about getting laptops fixed. Good luck!

san_grail March 4 2009, 23:33:18 UTC

Cheers for the link Urs!
But the only recommendation of an actual outfit there is Quay Computers, and well - it's from 2-3 years ago.

Appreciate the luck though.

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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.

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