C: working like a Dog!

[Joey12457]

Basicly this is my problem it appears on my notebook that my drive is
either corrupted or it just needs to be reformated. So I called Circuit
City's support personal and their only answer for me is just to format
the drive and see if the drive is bad of not. I would like to recover
the data off the disk but I am not sure how or if I really could even
get anything off it. I have read in some other posts that people have
pulled their drives turned them to slaves and copied the information
that way. Unfortunatly I have no idea how to do that with a laptop I do
have some PC knowledge but not so much on laptops. My machine boots up
then after it gets to the xp boot screen i dont know how else to
describe it, the screen with the status bar toward the lower middle of
the screen. Then once the status bar goes threw and windows should be
starting up my laptop turns off than automaticly restarts. Once it
begins to restart it goes directly to the safe mode screen asking me to
start windows normaly or by using variations of safe mode. I have
managed to get it to a DOS prompted but from what I see the computer
does not seem to know there is a c: installed. I am hopeing that
someone on this board can help me.

Thanking you in advance,
Joey

 

[Joey12457]

I actually cannot get into safe mode on my laptop it also does no
recognize that I actually even have one. When I get to command promp
it actually shows the A: as active drive. The only way I can even ge
there is because I start to do a reformating then I abort it righ
before it begins to format it out. I was told either the drive is dea
or it just is corrupted but I would like to get all my music, picture
and what not off of the drive I hope someone here can help.

Thanks again
Joey

 

[Joey12457]

Also when i type in the chkdsk c: /r it says that it is a bad command o
file. Then I try to use the command on the A: which is the active driv
and it still says that it is a bad file or command.

 

[Dr. C.Joseph Drayton, Ph.D. AS&T]

Also when i type in the chkdsk c: /r it says that it is a bad command or
file. Then I try to use the command on the A: which is the active drive
and it still says that it is a bad file or command.

Hi Joey12457,

I will assume that you have WindowsXP CD. If that is the case, set
the CDROM to be your first boot device. If it boots, then do a
repair install. If it will not do a repair install, then the drive
may be dying.

At that point I would pull the hard disk. Note these days most
manufacturers just have a door on the bottom of the laptop and you
remove it and slide out the drive. Put in a new drive and run you
WindowsXP disk again and do a clean install.

For $25 you can get a USB enclosure. Put the 'old' drive in the
enclosure and see if your clean install of Windows can recognize the
drive. If it can, copy those files you need.

Once you have saved your files, format the 'old' drive and then run
a diagnostic on it. If it bad, throw it away. If not, you now have
an external backup for your data.

Personally, I have two USB hard disk. One is an 80GB drive that
stays in my laptop drive, the other is a 250GB drive that stay on my
desk at home. I backup to both of them every Sunday. And I don't
mean just the data. Because my laptop is a development machine, I am
constantly loading and unloading software. I also make an image of
the system drive every week.

When in doubt backup. Even if your laptop hard disk never died what
would happen if your laptop would get stolen?

Ciao . . . C.Joseph

And on the seventh day God said,
"I will rest . . . Murphy take over."

 

[Joey12457]

Thank you very much for all your help. I actually have plans to go over
to a friends house and see what he can do with the drive. If what he
can think of does not work I will sure consider doing what you said I
actually am looking right now to see how much it will cost for a new
drive and an encloser. I also heard that you could get some software
the detects deleted and corrupted files I was also considering that
option. Do you think that software would work in that case?


Thank you very much
Joey