Back up options after possible hard drive crash

[Towaki Komatsu]

Monday, February 16, 2004 6:57 p.m. Central time

After learning last week that a friend has recently been
getting both "Operating System Not Found" and "Beginning
Dump of Physical Memory" on her Sony Vaio VX88 laptop with
Windows XP Professional installed, I am hoping that
someone may be able to suggest what options are available
to her to backup her data before she may need to have her
hard drive replaced. Also, she indicated that she is
hearing a ticking sound that seems to be coming from the
hard drive.

To try to help her fix the problem, I already had her boot
up in Safe Mode successfully, then do error-checking on
her hard drive, followed by Disk Defragmenting on it too.
However, in the case of defragmenting her drive, once the
process reached 85% complete, a "Beginning Dump of
Physical Memory" message appeared.

Some of the possible backup options that I've thought
might work include:

a) attaching a Zip or Jazz drive to her laptop;
b) connecting her laptop to another computer by using a
null-modem connection after booting up in Safe Mode with
Networking Support;
c) seeing if she can somehow connect her laptop to the LAN
at her office, then either moving her files from her
laptop to another workstation in the office or to an e-
mail message as an attachment.

Also, in the event that she needs to have her hard drive
replaced, approximately how much will it likely cost?

In any event, thank you in advance for your assistance.

 

[Towaki Komatsu]

After having tested a possible solution earlier today, I'm
adding a second posting to try to find out how I might be
able to enable the "write" functionality of a read-write
CD-Rom drive that is accessed after booting up in Safe
Mode with a Command Prompt. After booting up my system
that runs Windows XP Professional this way to find out if
my friend might possibly be able to backup her files by
copying them to a rewritable CD-Rom, I received a message
indicating that there was no disk in my CD-Rom drive after
I tried writing a file to a re-writable CD-Rom while there
was in fact a disk in the drive.

 

[D.Currie]

Safe mode only loads basic drivers, so it's probable that the write function
doesn't work. In older versions of Windows, generally the CD didn't work at
all.

Your best bet might be to remove the hard drive from the nonfunctional
computer, put it in a working machine, and copy the files that way.