karen2205 | Computers

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You've got a mechanical failure in the hard drive. Don't try to power the machine up again with that hard drive in; it's not going to work properly again, and you'll reduce the chances of recovering data.

The rest of the laptop is almost certainly fine, just in need of a new drive. A new laptop hard drive will cost you about £40-50.

If there's stuff on there which is very valuable to you, there are people who can physically disassemble the drive and attempt to recover data from the platters. This has to be done in a clean room, and is expensive - to the tune of hundreds, probably. I used Vogon to do this once.

If you can't afford that, there are freaks like me who have done amateur data recovery jobs. As

skibbley suggests, cooling the drive can often unjam things because of the different contraction/expansion rates of parts of the meachanism with temperature. To do this properly you have to cool the drive whilst keeping it dry - in a sealed box with a pack of silica gel is the best way - then start it from cold in a setup ready to back it up if it works.

Let me know if I can help in any way.

I'm thinking amateur data recovery might be the best bet - there's nothing on there that's so valuable that I'm willing to pay hundres of pounds to retrieve it (I've got sufficient paperwork that I can recreate the payroll without too much trouble). So when are you likely to be in London next?

I'm in London now, actually - bit of a flying visit. :-)

If you'd like me to take it and see what I can do with it, I could possibly meet you tomorrow somewhere. I'm leaving on the sleeper train.

That'd be great - when/where is good for meeting you - presumably Kings Cross station in the evening so you're not carrying it around for too long?

Euston, actually - sleeper leaves at 23:23, so I'd probably be aiming to be there at 23:00. But earlier in the evening and elsewhere would be fine, as I've not currently got plans past late afternoon.

Tried to leave you a voicemail message a while ago - guess you've not got it. I'm at home and not doing anything much right now so let me know when/where - it'll take me about half an hour to get into central London.

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