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My PC is off in the other room dying. It shut itself off overnight, refused to start this morning (bitched about hal.dll or somesuch), and I finally got it started in safe mode and it's now running chkdsk and finding a bunch of stuff it can't repair.
Irritiatingly it's not one of those that came with an OS disk--it's the sort that expects you to reimage it.
I'm pretty sure I have XP disks around here somewhere--just not the ones that built that machine. Grr. It's unlikely I'll lose much data or evene any apps, but I will lose a buttload of time and perhaps environments I'll need to reconfigure.
Ouch, ita. Do you think it's a dying drive, or some other problem?
I'm guessing it's a dying drive. I'm not sure what the right answer is here. I guess I'd replace the failing drive and restore the backup. Uh, which I don't have.
This is so not going to be fun. I have that uncharacteristic My Documents setup that I'm not even sure where it is. Ugh. Tedious.
Yup, that's it. She's no longer recognised by the BIOS. Which is even more tedious than I'd thought--I figured the essential files would be corrupt, not that the whole thing would be kerfluey. It's a pretty new drive too, now that I think about it.
I should have kept records.
Fuck. I need help. My laptop was working fine this morning, but now the screen won't turn on and the harddrive keeps spinning up over and over. Am I completely screwed? Can anyone help me? I have at least two months of un-backed up data that would really hurt to lose. (This is a new hard drive, btw, ND installed it for me in January.)
It might not be the hard drive at fault. Can you try taking the hard drive out and see if the screen comes on? It should power on regardless. You might find the system board is screwed, or the power supply.
What Kevin said, The drive may be fine, the controller might just be trying to access it a lot.
If it is the HDD maybe trying to boot up with an OSX CD/dvd might work.
Insert cd/dvd, turn it off, turn it on, hold down the letter C, see if it tries to boot.
The genius bar you mentioned in Bitches might be a good way to go.
We had one of those! My brother and I used it to carry our James Blish books of adaptations of Star Trek episodes.
tommyrot, my brother in geekwadiness.
I still have my James Blish Star Trek books.
