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Suspected head crash - what to do next.

  • 16-12-2008 2:30pm
    #1
    kmick
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 3,375 ✭✭✭


    Ok so my son knocked my laptop DELL 1720 onto a stone floor while it was playing music and now my laptop wont boot. Did a Dell PBA (Pre-boot assessment) and it said that "Inverter cable not present". Looked that up on Dell and it advises reseating ALL components. So I reseat RAM, Wireless Card and the hard drives as these are easily accessible. In the meantime I download UBUNTU to cd and boot it up. It loads fine (what a product in fairness to it). Both laptop drives spin up and are accessible but some files are missing including the area where all my music was held which would have been where the disk was reading at the time of the fall.

    Anyhow on the second drive there is a backup partition but this wont load in UBUNTU as its a windows exe obviously. I dont have a recovery disk but even if I did I would not use it on the 'good' drive as it would overwrite my backups. So what are my options - 'borrow' a recovery disk from work, buy a new drive and do a fresh install or does anyone have any other good ideas?

    Is there anyway of making the second good drive bootable in windows so I can try the recovery partititon exe and try and save the 'bad drive'.

    Thanks


Comments

  • #2
    Overheal
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 86,729 ✭✭✭✭Overheal


    Well firstly in regard to recovering the data on the faulty platter, unless you lost anything truly irreplaceable like wedding photos, write it off, or take it to a professional recovery team who will replace the head/remove and scan the platter for a princely sum.

    And just to get some clarity here, the damaged drive is the Master Drive where the OS is located and the Good Drive is the Slave Drive where all of the backups are located? And what format are the backups in? Is a secure/encrypted/compressed backup, or is it just raw files and folders? If the backups were transferred off, could you restore them to a new Machine?

    http://ultimatebootcd.com/ Should give you a number of options in terms of drive diagnostic and moving files between one drive to the next, or onto external USB, without booting windows.


  • #3
    kmick
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 3,375 ✭✭✭kmick


    Thanks Overheal - yes the boot/OS drive is knackered and the slave is ok. I cant get the files off but have a backup from 30/11 so not so bad. Its in a proprietary windows format though so who knows.
    Thanks for the link will have a look.


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