I really hope someone can help me with this, since I need this for school Monday.
Over the past few weeks, my Dell laptop (~2-3 years old) will randomly give me a blue screen, and I’ll have to manually restart it. Upon rebooting, it runs chkdsk and fixes any problems and it’s good for another week or so. Then about a week ago, it crashed on me again, but this time when I tried to reboot, it gave me a harddrive failure message. Oh crap, says I, so after several attempts it reboots and works fine. I back up my all my lecture notes and other important documents and pray it lasts me the rest of the year (c’mon baby, just until next June!). Then last night I was doing nothing, it blue screened, I restart, and it takes a loooooong time to restart. After which it goes to the default Windows XP desktop, complete with the popup that asks me if I’d like to take a tour of Windows, and almost none of my documents or things that I had on my desktop. I try going to My Documents and looking for my music, notes, etc, and it’s all gone. Then I checked to see how much space was left on the harddrive, and it’s the same as before. So as far as I can tell, it’s all still there, but I can’t access it in any way. It’s like my computer just got a new tenant who can’t find anything.
My best case scenario is that I can recover everything and use my computer until it really dies on me. Worst case is that I lose all the other stuff that was on it, which would make me sad, but it’s not a total loss since I backed up my most important things. Somewhere in between is probably where I’ll end up.
As my computer stands now, it still “works” but I’m afraid to do much out of fear that the more I do, the further I get from recovering my old data. Has anybody ever had this happen to them?
Have a scout around inside c:\documents and settings - it sounds like your machine ran the setup process again and might be logging you in as a newly-created user (if so, and if the setup didn’t wipe the drive, your documents should be there in a different user folder inside that one on the hard drive.
I believe that on most newer Dell laptops there is a key or key combination (Fn+F11?) that, if pressed when you turn on the PC, will restore the OS from the utility partition. However, I don’t know if it reformats the main partition or what. I second Mangetout: Look around in the Documents and Settings folder.
Sadly, I did look around the documents and settings folders, and it has a place for All Users and MyName, but nothing is inside either of them. MyName is a pretty unique name so I’m fairly certain it’s not just a case of Windows making a folder just for me. Strangely, it seems to have kept some of my programs, but not really. I found iTunes in my Startup menu, but when I clicked on it, it tried to install it. Huh? It also kept my Google Desktop, but that too thinks its brand new. It also keeps trying to reindex/search my computer, and when I tried to find files (both through Windows and Google Desktop), it can’t find them.
Your hard drive is dying, and it has lost a whole bunch of data. I hope that you have backups.
Well, crap. I did backup my important, irreplaceable stuff, but I need a laptop by Monday. I think this one is good until winter break starts, but does anybody have any suggestions for a cheap, light/portable laptop? I don’t want to buy a nice new one since if all goes to plan, I’ll be going to med school in the fall and I’ll have to buy another laptop then. I’m a little Dell-shy now after this problem and another friend’s laptop’s screen died after just a few months. I’d like an Apple of some sort, but I’m guessing there’s nothing there I could get for under $600, huh.
Why don’t you just replace the hard drive? You could install it yourself, and assuming you have the OS disk, you could be up and running by Monday.
Yes. Hard drives are cheap. Just make sure you check the thermal characteristics.
Huh, I didn’t realize it was so easy to replace a harddrive in a laptop. I’ll look into that. Is there no hope for the rest of my data though? I ran Dell’s diagnostic test thing at the startup, but it didn’t see any problems. Obviously, that’s incorrect, but I’m hoping that also indicates that the failure isn’t too severe.
It kind of sounds like one of the Windows Registry and/or User files were corrupted, and Windows “recovered” your system by swapping in the default empty copies. This makes the system look like it was just installed, but the folders where the programs and data live are still there.
If this is the case, you may be able to recover completely, or nearly so. Be aware that the what follows requires fooling with the registry files, and if something goes wrong, you could lose everything on the computer. Make sure you have a backup of everything you need first!
There are a couple of ways to do this, the easiest way is to temporarily take the drive out and put it in another system to do the recovery. If you can’t do this, it can be all done in the original system, but it requires booting the system from a restore CD and using the recovery console.
To use the boot CD and the recovery console method follow this link:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545/en-us
Keep in mind that if this is what happened, then your system is already partially recovered, so to speak, because it is already at the point where the generic “just installed windows” copies of the files have been put in the working folders. So you would start at
that point in the instructions for after you complete the first step and the system is booted looking like it is factory fresh. So you would start at “Part Two” in the instructions on that web page.
But if at all possible, put the drive in another system as a second drive and use that method. For about $30 at most electronics stores, you can buy an external drive enclosure that you can put the laptop drive in and connect it to another system via USB. That is a very easy way to do this.
The instructions for recovery after putting the drive in another machine I actually got from another doper here on the board. I don’t remember who posted it however, so if you recognize it, please let me know so I can give credit and thanks.
Here are those instructions:
Once you’ve got the drive migrated into a working XP machine, you need to go to your Folder Options and make sure that the check boxes are set to (a) view hidden files, and (b) view critical Operating System files. You will be warned that these are both bad ideas. Don’t sweat it.
In my case, the parasite drive was E:, so I went to E:\WINDOWS\system32\config and made backup copies of the files
default
sam
security
system
software
in that directory. I simply renamed them to *.bak, in case I (ha ha) wanted to restore to the previous, non-working condition.
I went to the System Volume Information folder in E:, and after looking up how a WinXP Home user opens this file under NTFS, opened it successfully. (WinXP won’t let you open the folder, even as admin, but it will let you try to share the folder on the LAN. After this process fails, you are able to look at the contents of the folder. The process is different depending on the version of XP and the filesystem you’re using.)
In this folder, I found a sub-folder called “_restore{1756EDF7-C75F-481E-8EBF-9B466A0579E5}” (YMMV on the name) and opened it. Inside this, there was a cornucopia of folders called RPxxx, where “xxx” is a three-digit number. I opened the highest-numbered of these, and found a “snapshot” folder containing old, slightly-renamed, copies of the five files above (default and the four S-words, each with something like “USER.RESTORE.REGISTRY.” appended to the filename). I copied these to E:\WINDOWS\system32\config and then renamed them to the shortened forms of their names.
I powered my machine down, migrated the drive over to the ailing box, and the booted her machine into WinXP. The one oddity was that I had to re-activate her copy of WinXP on startup. Other than that, it was just like doing a manual system restore.
If you are lucky enough that you have access to the “recovery console,” you can perform this operation without a second computer, but it requires two leaps of faith. The first is to replace the five system files above with their original versions, typically found in C:\WINDOWS\repair, via the command-line interface of the Recovery Console. Your computer at this point will act like WinXP has been freshly installed. You may think you are completely hosed. Follow the steps above using the GUI, and if you’ve been a good boy and made restore points regularly, you should have your system back up and running in no time.
It’s like being able to manually force the use of a known good restore point in WinXP, regardless of whether WinXP wants you to know the restore point is there. Hope someone stumbles across this and it does some good.
Good luck!
If you need some guidance on replacing the hard drive, let me know what model it is. But if it’s 2-3 years old, there’s probably just 2 screws near the edge on the bottom that you need to remove before sliding it out. You probably also need to pull off a connector-adaptor-thing from the old one and attach it to the 2 rows of pins on the new one. (I’ve never looked at a new laptop hard drive that’s not from Dell, but it seems that most Dell laptop hard drives have this, and I don’t know if it’s specific to Dell, because that’s the only brand of laptop that I work on.)
Wow, thanks so much. I’m going to give it a shot; Compusa has a 120 gb drive for $70 that I’m going to pick up today. I’m at school so I don’t have the OEM disk, but I’ll see if I can borrow someone else’s copy of XP for now until I get home over the holidays and get my real one. Replacing the hard drive actually looks like it’s pretty easy. Thanks so much again, and hopefully something will work!
This will work only if the copy of XP is not an OEM disk. Dell disks (or HP, or eMachines) are machine specific, so you can’t use them on another manufacturer, or even another model series from the same manufacturer.
Since I haven’t been able to get the new hard drive and enclosure and stuff to try the method outlined above, I thought I’d try the system restore, which I had completely forgotten was even an option. Interestingly, it still has restore points listed prior to the big crash. So I chose the most recent one, and it restored some stuff, like my folder settings, desktop settings, but still no files, and still programs open up like they’re brand new (i.e. Firefox wants to know if I want to import bookmarks from IE, other stuff comes up with ‘Did you know?’ boxes). Given that I was able to ‘restore’, if I do the restore like outlined by RJKUgly will it make a difference? Is that restore going to be different from the restore I just did?
Wait! A breakthrough! I looked in my recent documents and there were some documents I thought were gone. So I looked for where they are, and they’re under C:\found.000 and C:\found.001. There are directories under there that seem to have all my old stuff! I clearly need a new hard drive still, but my data is back! Can anyone explain what happened with these and what these magical, happy folders are?
They’re folders created by a disk repair utility, probably chkdsk in this case, which I’m assuming ran automatically during one of the long bootups. If it finds files or folders that have been damaged, it tries to restore them using that naming convention. Often files in the damaged folders may be fine, or may be corrupted themselves, so check them carefully before you assume their OK.
At this point I’d say my idea is not going to help, as it’s clear you’ve had other problems than a simple corruption of the registry files. But it seems you found some of you lost stuff, so that’s good! I guess you could try my method, or even just choose some earlier restore point in System Restore, which is really all my trick did, give you access to restore points that windows had track off because of the file corruption.
Next step is probably get a new hard drive ASAP, do a clean install of windows and your applications, then copy all the data you can from the old drive. An external enclosure like I mentioned in my previous post is a cheap and simple way to hook your old drive up to the system as a second drive after getting the new drive installed.
Remove hard drive.
Clean connection with
http://www.mcminone.com/product.asp?product_id=SABU10191&catalog_name=MCMProducts
:dubious:
I’m not exactly sure what to make of the pen. But… um… thanks for the suggestion?
I found a free utility that makes an image of my harddrive, which would be perfect for me since I don’t have all my install discs to easily install stuff onto a new hard drive. If the problem is with my hard drive failing, I can make a copy of everything (via that imager program) and then put it on my new hard drive, and there won’t be any problems, right? Assuming that no files, or not many were corrupted, everything else should be transferred just fine with no more random BSODs or corrupting files, correct?
It will be exactly the same after the imaging. If it’s not working right now, it won’t on the new drive either.