Computers

[karen2205]

My laptop now seems to have given up completely. Last night it started making weird whirring and clicky noises, then blue screened (which is normal) and then I got a different blue screen saying 'unable to write to disk C'. Let it whirr/click away for a while, then realised that it wasn't going to fix itself, so turned it off and left it till the morning (in case the weird noises were caused by over heating). Tried to turn it on this morning and got the same weird noise combined with it being unable to find the operating system.

Bollocks. I've been intending to buy a new computer for ages, but I'd not anticipated it breaking quite like this. Unless there's some way to get it working again I'm going to have to recreate the pay data from April onwards and I'm going to have to have the payroll software on my new machine which I really don't want.

And this is ignoring the inconvenience of losing my email archive/other documents from January 2003 to date.

Anyone got any suggestions of things I could try to get it working?

For the forseeable future this means I'll only have internet access at work.

Comments

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Before you start thinking about buying a new HD, consider a reinstall of the OS. Which version of Windows is it running, and how old is the install? Windows has this annoying habit of degrading over time; it's what happened with my laptop after about 3 years. You can coax it out for a while with a recovery disk and use of chkdsk /p for a while (I kept mine going for a whole year like that), but eventually you'll just have to reinstall - at which point suddenly it's all running absolutely fine again, whereas just before the reinstall you would have sworn the hard drive was on its last legs and dying!

If you're running XP but don't have disks, I have a recovery CD you're welcome to try. Even if you don't have the disks to do a fresh reinstall, it should enable you to get the laptop working again so you can get the data off; I have a W2K install disk you could use so you'd still have a Windows system to enable you to reinstall the payroll software (which I'm presuming you have the disks to hand for).

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

"Unable to write to drive C" is exactly what it is though, and any attempt at reinstall is only going to further ruin any chances of recovery of data (as slim as they sound at this point), *especially* with a whirr-click noise. Before you do *anything* else (including turning the computer on again), you'll probably want to talk to some data recovery people.

Whirr-click noises are an extremely bad sign, and should be immediately met with a full backup of all your data. Although it's probably too late in this case, if the time/effort are worth a significant amount of money to you, you'll want to look into data recovery options: however, this is not going to be cheap. (Think along the line of thousands of USD, and you'll probably be in the right ballpark.) So it depends how much your work is worth to you.

G'luck.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

I'd disagree. My laptop behaved exactly this way, right down to the noises, error message and then failing to find the OS. I put on a clean install of Ubuntu and it works perfectly now.