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Thread: Laptop hard drive dead??

  1. #1
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    Default Laptop hard drive dead??

    Ok so my boss man's laptop screwed up yesterday with a virus. Nothing big really AVG fixed the problem, and spybot cleaned up some other stuff. He still complained that it was slow (5+ min boot time to xp despite 2.4 GHz processor and 1 gig of ram). I asked when he ran disk defrag last time and he looked at me cross eyed and was like "whut?". So I showed him how to start it running, we went outside sprayed some weed killer came back it was at like 12 % after about 2 hours. I thought pretty normal considering it probably never been done.

    Went to lunch came back and screen was locked up. I tried ctrl alt del but nothing would unlock it. Manually powered off and restarted. Got to screen saying windows shut down unexpectedly yadda yadda . Choose start normal, blue screen for like .001 sec and restarted. Tried the other options, last known good config, safe mode, safe mode with networking, safe mode with command prompt with same results.

    Went into bios and ran hard disk check from there, didn't get past 0% got error #1- 07. Downloaded and ran seagate sea tools. Basic test told me to run advanced test. It failed and said it was unable to fix problems (about 75 errors before 1%).

    Is the hard drive hosed? Is there any way to get any of the data off the disk. I'm downloading ultimate boot cd right not to try it. Any other ideas?

    tl;dr ran defrag and think it killed hard drive is that possible?
    "Back in the old, dark days of the internet when men were men, women were men, and children were FBI agents, no one cared what people thought of them"

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    God That Smelled Good linkinkampf19's Avatar
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    Sounds like the drive was on it's last legs to begin with. How old of a laptop was it?

    Defrag might've just pushed it that extra step to say "Fuck it, I'm dead", as defrag does move data physically around on the disc. I would suggest try both Hiren's Boot CD and Ultimate Boot CD (legality is the only real difference between them).

    Other than that, maybe running a Live CD for Ubuntu, Puppy Linux, or somewhere in between would get something for ya, but it's no guarantee.
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    Just wanted to wrap this up by saying that I was able to boot linux mint cd, force the drive to mount and copy most of the pictures and more importantly the data files for the business off to a usb thumb drive. Some of the pictures he had on there were corrupt along with a couple other random word files of not huge importance.

    After data was recovered I attempted to format and reinstall windows, after it got done marking the bad sections about half of the total 40 gig's of space was unusable. New hard drive on order, and new knowledge gained.

    On a side note now the boss man knows the importance of BACK-UPS.
    "Back in the old, dark days of the internet when men were men, women were men, and children were FBI agents, no one cared what people thought of them"

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