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It started dying, so I reformatted it. Now it seems to have well and truly died, it won’t boot at all, when I go into the setup thing by pressing F8 at the start and run the hard disk test it says my hard disk is dead. I need a computer, preferably a laptop for uni. Is it worth getting this repaired or should I just buy a new one? Are all laptops shit? I’ve had 2 and both of them have died fairly quickly!
Ahhhh ffs Now, after refusing to do anything all day, it has decided to allow me to reformat.
What tests can I run on it to see what the f its problem is?
grab a trial of activesmart, it the drive is enabled with self monitoring it will let you know its due to crap out. trouble is most dont know there fekked..
and your best bets finding where the drive is by removing the panels under the lappy, take it to maplins and ask for something the same physical size, you can have more space on the drive, so can go from a 20gb to 80gb, they should stock them anyway and be able to offer you something 🙂
Tess,
Do you have access to another PC as well, you can run a Linux Live distribution to check your HD. Download Knoppix:
Write the file to a CD, if you haven’t got a anything that will write an ISO then download:
http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm
Which is a tiny iso burning program with no nasties in it.
Once you made the CD boot the laptop from it, usually you can do this by just having the cd in the drive when the machine is switched on or you might have to go into the boot setup and tell it to boot from the CD. Let me know if you have problems with it.
Knoppix runs entirely from the CD so you can run it on a machine with a duff Hard Drive, if it can read the hard drive you’ll see it as an icon on the desktop and you should be able to copy files you want to keep onto a USB key. If knoppix doesn’t boot it may be that it’s not a duff hard drive but something else wrong.
There is a sort of windows live cd at:
But I’ve never used it.
HTH
Thanks for all the suggestions, unfortunately I got a blue screen just before the end of the reformat again so I’m going to give Knoppix a go 🙂 I’m too tired tonight, so I’ll give it a go tomorrow. Cheers Stan xx
you can get similar symptoms from knacked ram chips
boot a copy of memtest just in case – if you get any red writing your mem is damaged
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