Laptop died - looking for advice

[mfsoa]

So I'm just surfing (nothing new loaded) like always and poof - blue screen with lots of writing on it that I can't remember. Now when I try to turn it on, I get a few seconds of fan whir, what sounds like the optical drive looking for a disc, then all quiet. Nothing comes up on the monitor, the fan stops. The hard drive light never flashes.

I'm thinking hard drive failure.

Is it worth picking up a new hard drive (~$60) and the Acer restore discs (~$20) and seeing if this works?

Or bring it to a shop (or Staples where I got it) to see what they diagnose.

Bummin' - That's my music server!

Thanks anyone

-Mike

[topround]

BSOD
I had that once...my wife walked into the room..she saw the Blue screen of Death and said, :Oh no, the blue screen of death", I said"what?" she said "blue screen of death, not good"
How do I fix it?
She said the tech guys at UBS would just take the computer and give it a new hard drive, which is what I did.

My next move...Ubuntu...much stabler

[richidoo]

Can you load the BIOS setup screen at boot?  If that works then it's likely that the puter is OK. If you have a bootable CD you could try to run from that just to verify that only the hard disk is dead.

I can dropbox you a diagnositic CD that is self booting, but you'd need to burn it to CD-R. But if the HD is not even spinning or lighting, it's probably dead. I would take it out and reseat it just for kicks. Also note in BIOS if the HD appears in the list of SATA or IDE devices. One trick is to put it in a zip plastic bag and freeze it in the freezer, sometimes that revives it long enough to pull off some files. But in the long run it's toast.

Western Digital is a good brand for HDDs now. I like Seagate Barracudas too, but many disagree.

[allenzachary]

My daughter's HP had similar symptoms and it turned out that it had lost the BIOS, which is another way of saying failed motherboard. 

An easier method to confirm HDD operation may be to remove it from your BSOD laptop and drop it into another PC we know is working. Or you can get one of these laptop HDD enclosures and put the old HDD into it for testing.
  http://insidecomputer.stores.yahoo.net/2usb20alhadr.html
If the HDD proves bad, it hasn't cost you very much.  If it is good, you've diagnosed your issue cheaply and quickly, plus you have a spare external HDD.

We salvaged the HDD from my daughter's  laptop with one of these.  She still has her music and files on the HDD, and we sold the carcass of the laptop for parts.

[tmazz]

I agree with Allen, an enclosure is mthey way to go. They are dirt cheap and may allow you to recover your data, which I think is more important than salvaging the hardware. I have often seen situations where a Windows file got corupted and the drive could not boot or operate the machine but the HDD was perfectly functional and could be read as a secondary drive on another machine.

http://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.phtml?Ntt=HDD+enclosure&N=0&submit.x=14&submit.y=12

As for what to do about the laptop it self, you didn'y say how old and what type of processor/RAM and HHD space it has. If ikt is more than a yerar or two old it just may not be worth paying someone to repair it. LAptops have gotten rediculously cheap over the past two years. About six months ago I got my sone an i5 based laptiop with 6Gbs of RAM and a 1TB HD for $545. If you have to pay someone to work on it your are going to pay $75 - $100 an hour plus parts. AT those prices it doesn't take much before the cost of the repair becomes unreasonable. Try the enclosure route and if you can get at your data, a new machine just might be the best way to go.

Good luck.

[bpape]

The same thing happened to my Daughter's laptop.  Played with it for a while and found it was a shorted battery. If on AC power with battery removed, it came up just fine.  With the battery in, exactly what you're describing.

Try pulling the battery.  Easy enough to do and a cheap fix if that's the problem.

Bryan

[hometheaterdoc]

it's most likely the hard drive...  

if you don't own one, it should be required for anyone with a PC to spend the $10-$20 on a SATA to USB dongle to allow you to hook up 2.5" hard drives to a USB port so you can salvage some files off the drives...  it's saved my butt so many times it's not funny.... no matter how many times you back up your laptop, you always need some file that only got created or modified between the time you took your last backup and the failure....  

this should work:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812123312

just search on Newegg for "SATA to USB".... I have one the pricier versions that also allows IDE to USB on the same dongle and a power supply for big power hard drives where the USB power isn't enough...

remember, it's not "if" your hard drive will fail, it's "when"....  it would scare me to think of how many hard drives I've gone through over the years...  certain models have had issues... some have been insane... I have 8 year old IDE drives that are still powered 24/7 that I write to and read from every day... I've had seagate 2GB SATA drives come to their demise within an hour of coming out of the package (had 12 of them die in less than 2 months total... that was a great purchase, let me tell you...  still didn't get them replaced to this day under warranty... which is why I'll never own another seagate after being one of thier biggest fans for years and years and years)...  laptop hard drives are in terrible spots and can get abused much moreso than typical desktop drives....  the advent of SSDs has been sooooo wonderful for laptop hard drives....  they take more abuse and are soooooo much faster than 5400rpm 2.5" laptop drives... it's allowed years more use out of older laptops just by replacing the hard drives....

[djdube525]

the advent of SSDs has been sooooo wonderful for laptop hard drives....  they take more abuse and are soooooo much faster than 5400rpm 2.5" laptop drives... it's allowed years more use out of older laptops just by replacing the hard drives....

Agreed... I was debating what to do with my old school laptop (2.5 years old) which was starting to get long in the tooth. I installed a 120G Intel SSD... night and day. Boot times, application load times... it screams. SSDs are one of the best bang for the buck (despite their high price) in terms of increasing performance it seems.

[richidoo]

SSD sounds cool. So how does the USB dongle help recover a dead HDD? Or do you mean you can use it to backup a good drive to USB drive?

What software is good for a disk copy nowadays?
Is USB fast enough to do it in reasonable time?
Thanks

[hometheaterdoc]

the dongle only helps if the hard drive has bad sectors or is in the process of failing... you have the opportunity before it completely dies to power it up as a slave drive on another desktop or laptop and copy off files...  if the power controller on the drive is shot or the platters really are completely gone and the thing won't even power, nothing is going to help it including this dongle... but if you can get it to power up long enough to connect it to another machine, you can save some of the files...  I had a laptop that got about 1000 gallons of water dumped on it during my flood... the machine was complete toast, but the hard drive powered up a couple times and allowed me to get some files off it before it gave up the ghost as well...  that was a life saver because my backup drives didn't do so well with the other 9000 gallons of water that spilled on them....

most hard drives give you some warning signs they are about to go... sometimes it's noise, sometimes it's intermittent program issues as certain sectors of the hard drive go bad...

if you are running win7, the backup software built into the OS is pretty darn good... I use it and have successfully recovered from it numerous times.... it will create a full image backup to a usb drive... just set it up to do it overnight one night...  USB hard drives are so stupid cheap right now it's a no brainer that won't cost a fortune....  it should be able to do 500GB-1TB easily overnight over USB....

[richidoo]

Thanks very much Shane!! Good info.

[mfsoa]

I'll read through all of your helpful posts when I get home tonight, thanks very much for the input.

But this morning, lo and behold, she started up!  Really slowly, and with several "Hey, I just recovered from a serious error, do you want me to fix..." messages.

I'm trying to install Service Pack 1 for Win7 but the install won't complete - Should I bother?

Of course I already ordered a replacement drive  and the Acer restore discs. I guess I'll return the HD (or should I hang on to it?) but keep the restore CDs, just in case.

Thanks again, everyone 

[hometheaterdoc]

definitely keep the restore CDs... it won't help you with any additional software you've installed on the machine since you've gotten it.  You'll have to re-install that... but having an ability to back to a fresh install is helpful, especially if you turn off system restore capability in windows to increase performance.......  of course if you get a nice backup of your system after you've re-installed all the other programs and have the PC patched to current levels, the restore CDs likely won't be of as much value.....

keep an eye on www.techbargains.com and other computer part discount alert sites... figure out what size hard drive you can get away with for OS and programs (and absolutely must have audio if you want it on the speedy drive) and get a deal on an SSD... you'll likely thank us later...  even the 10K rpm Velociraptors can't touch what an SSD can do.... and some of the newer stuff is now supporting the new version of SATA 6GB/s transfer capability... I only use spinning hard drives for data since even the WD "green" drives have enough throughput to stream blu-ray across the network... for OS drives, I can't imagine being without an SSD anymore....

[richidoo]

1st thing is get any good data off of it. Hold onto the replacement HDD as long as you can before returning it, because the HDD will probably fail again if it is on the skids.

After you get all the good data backed up, then run a diagnostic tool on the hard drive, like:
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools

If it passes that with no errors, then maybe there was another cause beside the HDD.

There are other diagnostic tools that can test memory and controllers, etc. I use Tufftest Pro.  A bad bit in memory can gradually ruin system files which makes Windows unreliable.

[tmazz]

I just picked up an external network storage device from a company called Clickfree that has built in software that will do back-ups of all your computers across your home network. 1Tb drive and it was only $65. I have not had a chance to set it up yet, but I will report back once I do.

Details here:

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0366812

At least on paper it looks like a nice system.