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Unread 18 Oct 2006, 13:01   #1
JamMak
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In a spot of bother....

Hmm, I may have accidently stepped on my girlfriends laptop recently It now won't recognise teh hard disk when booting up.

Have had the usual poke around, tried swapping hard disks with another laptop and hooking it up to my PC but with no joy - the question is thus;

What's the best way of getting anything more serious than a dodgy screen or usb port on a laptop repaired? Hundreds of "Laptop repair centers" in London, and I wouldn't trust any of them to be able to do any more than poke around with a screwdriver, tell me "yup, it's broken", and change me £50 for the privilege.

Sending it back to HP, or if all else fails, even some kind of data recovery place and a new hard disk would be acceptable (I'm guessing I will probably have to pay through the nose whatever I do)

Manufactuers disks, warrenties etc. are all in another country.

Any of you lot got experience with getting a buggered laptop repaired?

P.S. I'm putting it here not P&IT because it's not a technical question
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Unread 25 Oct 2006, 13:09   #2
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Re: In a spot of bother....

Quote:
Originally Posted by JamMak

Manufactuers disks, warrenties etc. are all in another country.
yes - buggered screen on a fujitsu/siemans - screens cost an arm and a leg and half a kidney :-( took it to a small place near me .. who didnt give me the run around, rang me with my options and told me what was wrong.
Didnt Charge me for looking at it to see what was wrong and took my quote of £150 as the point at which they could go to to fix it ( its not new and after that point i would have bought a new laptop for cost effectiveness )
They sourced 2nd hand product from a place that scraps old laptops in the USA .. imported it and fixed it for £95.
And when i produced cash took another tenner off the cost.

I will go back there if i have issues i cant solve, so basically .. give theese laptop repairers a chance.

but manufaturers warranties are international if its from HP which is a US company .. they will have repair centres in various countries. Check if they have one in yours.
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Unread 25 Oct 2006, 13:32   #3
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Re: In a spot of bother....

Do you not have contents insurance?

'Drop' it down the stairs and claim off that, thats all i did.
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Unread 25 Oct 2006, 19:00   #4
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Re: In a spot of bother....

so you cant see another good hard drive even when thats plugged in?

Did you make sure you took off the little black connector from the pins of the 'faulty' hard drive? You definately need this to make the drive work.

If thats the case then you have buggered the motherboard - yup the most expensive part of the laptop!

What does the laptop do when you boot it up? Make a noise? Error codes? Anything?

Can you get into the BIOS? Have you tried manually telling it there is a HD installed?

What is the model of laptop by the way?
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Unread 25 Oct 2006, 19:03   #5
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Re: In a spot of bother....

oh, and if you really need to recover data from the HD I will offer to have a go at doing this (Im asked to do it all the time in my current job). PM me. But if its physically broken you will need to send it to a data recovery company which will cost you!
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Unread 27 Oct 2006, 12:16   #6
JamMak
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Re: In a spot of bother....

Hmm, ta for the advice!

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mistwraith
but manufaturers warranties are international if its from HP which is a US company .. they will have repair centres in various countries. Check if they have one in yours.
Well I'm in the UK, but my girlfriend has left all her docs back in Lithuania. Wouldn't be able to get them for a couple of months.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Game^
Do you not have contents insurance?

'Drop' it down the stairs and claim off that, thats all i did.
Nope, just moved in to a new studio. Altho could always 'drop' it back home or something...

CrashTester:

Quote:
so you cant see another good hard drive even when thats plugged in?
Nope. Nor can I see the 'bad' drive plugged into a 'good' laptop. Or either plugged into a PC via 2.5">3.4" cable.

Quote:
Did you make sure you took off the little black connector from the pins of the 'faulty' hard drive? You definately need this to make the drive work.
Tried with and without the jumper pin.

Quote:
If thats the case then you have buggered the motherboard - yup the most expensive part of the laptop!
Hmmm yes. In some ways that's , but if the hard drive is ok (and the data...)

Quote:
What does the laptop do when you boot it up? Make a noise? Error codes? Anything?
"Invalid System Disk" error after POST.

Quote:
Can you get into the BIOS? Have you tried manually telling it there is a HD installed?
BIOS works fine. WIndows installation setup works fine (tho fails when it can't find any hard disks).

Quote:
What is the model of laptop by the way?
Can't remember, but I'll have a lookw hen I get home. It's pretty new, just a few months old.

Cheers CT
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Unread 31 Oct 2006, 11:25   #7
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Re: In a spot of bother....

Quote:
Originally Posted by JamMak
CrashTester:


Nope. Nor can I see the 'bad' drive plugged into a 'good' laptop. Or either plugged into a PC via 2.5">3.4" cable.
OK, if you cant see a good HD in your laptop then In my experience (and I fix laptops for a living) it sounds like you may have unfortunately damaged the motherboard.

If there is any kind of physical damage to the laptop then you can forget a warranty claim you would need to claim on home contents insurance that covers accidental damage.

The best thing you can do with the faulty HD if you want to try a retrieve data is to buy yourself a USB caddy and plug it into that (I bought mine for about a tenner on ebay). Then plug the USB device into another system and see if you can read it. You may have somehow corrupted/damaged the part of the disk with the FAT32/NTSF information in which case it will not boot, the data elswhere on the disk may be fine though. If you cant see any data after trying this then the drive is royally screwed and only a data recovery lab will be able to help you.
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Unread 31 Oct 2006, 20:31   #8
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Re: In a spot of bother....

Did u fly over with it .... in your *cough* luggage..do u intend to go abroad any time soon ?

buy travel insurance that will cover the laptop then it can have an accident :-)
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Unread 1 Nov 2006, 00:55   #9
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Re: In a spot of bother....

Get new girl friend. Problem solved.
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Unread 13 Nov 2006, 16:58   #10
JamMak
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Re: In a spot of bother....

Quote:
Originally Posted by dda
Get new girl friend. Problem solved.
Hmm, tempting.

But, a Hard Drive Caddy did arrive. And lo! The hard was duff

Have had a quick look at data recovery places. Seem to be mega-£££. CrashTester, anyone, any places you could reccommend that charge a resonable fee? (Assuming you're UK)

Cheers.
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Unread 20 Nov 2006, 18:52   #11
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Re: In a spot of bother....

sorry mate, never used them - most people are put off by the price!!

One thing to try. Get a windows XP disk and boot from it. Run trough to the menu screen that give 3 options - 1 to reinstall windows, 2 to repair windows and 3 to exit.

Select number 2. This takes you into the Repair Console.

From here just try typing CHKDSK.

I just had a drive that wouldnt load, it kept rebooting before windows loaded and after running this it worked fine.
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Unread 24 Nov 2006, 17:59   #12
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Re: In a spot of bother....

who is the fukwit who repped me with the comment not to bump threads?? Seriously, get a clue.
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Unread 24 Nov 2006, 19:30   #13
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Re: In a spot of bother....

I've tried a stack of different methods to recover data before. Some of them with limited sucess, its going to depend whether your problem is either a damaged file structure or actual physical damage to the heads/platter/board.

If it's just a damaged file structure I've had good results with GetDataBack. They have a demo version you can download that will at least be able to check the drive to see if the data is still there.

In the case of phsyical damage, most of the time you can kiss your data goodbye. I geuss theres a reason those data recovery places charge so much. One method I've heard of involves placing your HDD in a plastic bag in the freezer for about 15 mins then hooking it up straight away. It is said that this has good results but you'll get one chance at getting your data back before the HDD dies permanently, all I ended up with was a cold and ultimately still useless HDD. I've even gone to the extreme of trying to swap the HDD platters into an identical unit, this once again did not work.
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