Help Royally screwed

[Laddey]

Hey, so last night i was browsing the internet as you do, and my laptop suddenly decided to crash, which is weird because my laptop is in good nick and i tend to keep it this way.

So i reboot, it took fucking AGES to come on, i left it over night booting up and i woke up this morning and i got the error message...

Operating System Not Found.

I cant access it, it wont even let my enter safe mode it just hangs like that.

it wouldn't matter i COULD format, but if i do i'd loose all my college work and my year would be a total fail, i couldn't catch up with all my work since it has to be in TOMORROW !

9 months of my life gone to waste if i can't solve this problem.

Any ideas?

 

[Bahumat]

Do you have a 2nd hard drive? You could probably install Windows on another hard drive, then set that as the Master. If you set the "broken" hard drive as the Slave, it wont need to find an operating system so you may be able to browse the contents.

 

[Bahumat]

It could be the hard drive is dieing. Try turning the laptop on upside down, or on its side. I know it sounds like im taking the piss but it sometimes works.

 

[Laddey]

Do you have a 2nd hard drive? You could probably install Windows on another hard drive, then set that as the Master. If you set the "broken" hard drive as the Slave, it wont need to find an operating system so you may be able to browse the contents.

It's a laptop mate, is that possible?

I'm so screwed if this doesn't work.

If i fail my course, i don't get my job, if i dont get my job i wont have a roof over my head.

 

[nath]

It's a bit awkward but what you need to do is buy a USB caddy for laptop drives. You should be able to unscrew the hard drive from the laptop (be firm with it but careful). It's a fairly straightforward process, then once you've got the hard drive out you can plug it in to the caddy and hook that up to another computer and see if it can be mounted. If so, you can browse what files are there and copy the data over. Chances are the drive is faulty/damaged but you might be able to browse to your files and grab the important stuff.

I'm not sure where you'd get this caddy on such short notice - Maplin definitely sell them, PC World *might*.

 

[Kryten]

Also worth downloading a live CD for another OS : Ubuntu is ideal, then you can boot from the disc and browse your drive, assuming it's still recognised and works that much.
You can then stick in a USB pen or drive or something then copy everything you need over.

Then download the appropriate diagnostic software for the possibly failed hard drive and run that as required, see if the drive is buggered or if you've just fallen foul of a software nasty.

If so, first try a repair installation of your OS, just boot from the XP/Vista CD and follow instructions to reinstall the OS over the top. It'll keep the files but replace the windows system.

Or maybe its just the startup files gone walkabouts.

XP : Boot from the XP CD and at the first prompt hit R for recovery console
At the prompt, type
fixmbr
then
fixboot

Restart, see if it works.

Vista : Boot from Vista DVD, and chose the startup file repair option. Restart, see if it works.

 

[nath]

Ah yes, the Ubuntu live cd - keep forgetting about that. Gotta try it at some point, I expect it'd be very helpful for my work.

 

[Bob007]

All you linux live cd fans bla

Bart PE ftw, ntfs/fat file system access with no "sudo mount world please" and so on stuff

Saying that, I do use both, but in this case i'd recommend Bart PE. You can set set the network support up and pass files to another machine across a network share in a win32 enviroment.

Also check the HDD is showing in the BIOS. If it isn't, Neither live CD's will work.

other option is one of these bad boys. Own 1 myself, best thing i ever brought after my post coder.

 

[Kryten]

Main reason I suggest LiveCD's over BartPE is that Linux is so much better and more efficient at reading Windows files systems than Windows is. It puts less pressure on a drive and allows for a more secure/efficient/complete backup.

Besides which all the recent ones have full read/write support without any fancy guffy commands

 

[Cadelin]

9 months of my life gone to waste if i can't solve this problem.

Any ideas?

I realise this might not be the best time to tell you this but in future back things up.

You can get a usb stick for virtually nothing nowadays and use that to store your most important files. There are many other ways of backing up data and most are alot better than just a usb stick.

I really hope you manage to recover the data on your disk, it sucks to lose work.

 

[xane]

I got this once when upgrading a HDD. Check the setting of the HDD in BIOS, it normally defaults to "CHS", but in my case I needed to force to "Large" (or Extended CHS, or ECHS), overriding the auto detect. If the laptop somehow reset the BIOS and defaulted the settings it might cause this.

 

[Laddey]

lol, well now its a laughing matter, before i start thanks to everybody who tried helping.

A few weeks ago a plastic thing (cover) fell off the side of my laptop, i thought nothing much of it (daft) and now i know it was the HDD cover, the HDD come loose and i had to actually push it back in and now it works, all files are there. Thank fook for that.

Appreciate it

 

[WPKenny]

 

[Cadelin]

lol, well now its a laughing matter, before i start thanks to everybody who tried helping.

I am glad your files are safe. Now back them up you utter moron!

 

[Cromcruaich]

This is the mutts nuts - UBCD for Windows

Also you dont have to format a disk to reinstall the OS - you can just install it over the old one - you wouldn't lose any user data. But try the boot disk first.


*edit
doh, just read the last posts! Seconded - back it up you moron! Get an external hdd and make use of any offlaptop storage that is backed up - like your user space on your college user account. Even email it to a friend.

 

[Mabs]

lol, well now its a laughing matter, before i start thanks to everybody who tried helping.

A few weeks ago a plastic thing (cover) fell off the side of my laptop, i thought nothing much of it (daft) and now i know it was the HDD cover, the HDD come loose and i had to actually push it back in and now it works, all files are there. Thank fook for that.

Appreciate it

NOW BACK UP YOUR LIFE CHANGING WORK ONTO SOMETHING OTHER THAN YOUR HDD INCASE IT DOES FAIL

this is why you should NEVER have it only in one place

 

[Laddey]

I know, i know.

I'll back everything up onto a few DVD's.

Finished college today, couldnt imagine the stress i would of been under if my work was lost, 9months gone!

Thanks!