Q: Ive posted this in General Hardware and got no answer. (
My sister has a 2 years old Compaq laptop and about a month ago started giving the BIOS error “imminent hard drive failure or something in that direction. They thought it was a virus, and brought it to me to watch this weekend.
When gave me Ahold, the computer would still boot, but was tempted to just quit abruptly. I ran a test surface of the disk and find all sorts of bad sectors, which replaced it, but as of yesterday morning, the drive will not boot. It will go through the launch of Windows XP “screen, and occasionally get to the login screen, but then it suddenly turned off.
I went out and bought a USB enclosure so I can hook drive to my computer and get some information from the road, but it makes this ominous clicking sound when powered up. “Unplug or Eject Hardware wizard detects the USB connection and says it works, but never drive my computer.
Is anything else I can do? Ill try the freezer trick if nothing else works.
Update: The laptop bios detects the hard drive still. Is there any kind of bootable CD that I can use that can read NTFS and will allow me to access the network? That way I can pull the files I need on my computer. I have nothing I can hook up the drive to the laptop, except at the moment. The USB enclosure is not work.
Edit: I posted this here because they will murder me if I did not adopt it quickly. I do not know why, because I did not break to begin with .
Re:I suppose I should mention that I had 2 threads going and this was figured out in the other one.
http://{$MySite}/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=1322356
Thanks for the suggestions.
Re:Boot from a Knoppix CD and you may be able to recover some of the data. It will automatically mount the drive and you can copy the files to another network storage space, or usb drive.
Re:Bart PE NTFS Boot CD. (http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/)
Re:I've hooked it up to my parents computer using the USB enclosure. Apparantly it didn't like my 2000 machine because it works fine on their xp machine. I'm trying to get all of the files now.
Re:You could try a knoppix or gentoo liveCD…
I've not tried a knoppix cd yet, but I know you can do what you want with gentoo. Just mount the drive, enable ssh and log in remotely. Then copy what you need and yeah… I hear knoppix is even easier though.
Re:In short, probably not.
I think instead of a USB enclosure, you should try an adapter to hook a laptop HD up to an standard ATA connector, startup your computer, and if the laptop can still read it from that connection, so should your computer.
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