The hard drive in my wife's laptop seems to be on its last leg. Motor spools up to less than half the rpm and stays there (pretty constantly). After an hour of warm-up a power cycle usually brings it to life at full rpm. Sound like it'll croak soon. No XP disks came with this machine, meaning I must mirror :-(
I tried installing "Paragon Drive Backup 9.0 Express" on a USB stick but it must have written DLLs to this PC's drive. Darn. Meaning it does not start off a USB stick. But it has to because the laptop will have to get off the ground with a completely empty new hard drive.
Has anyone ever sucessfully run Paragon off a USB stick? Or a CD?
--
Regards, Joerg
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ols up to less than half the rpm and stays there (pretty constantly). After= an hour of warm-up a power cycle usually brings it to life at full rpm. So= und like it'll croak soon. No XP disks came with this machine, meaning I mu= st mirror :-(
Are you sure there isn't a "system restore" CD or something with words to that effect that includes a custom version of Doze that will only work with that brand / model of portable PC and is preconfigured? (NB it may not show any obvious MS markings even for main brands)
If you have a valid activation code for XP registered to this machine you should in principle at least be able to reinstall from any XP CD with the usual pain and suffering of installing FP1, FP2 and FP3 too.
Wise to do the first two offline, a pre FP1 version of XP would not last long enough to do anything on the internet these days before it was harvested by a botnet.
it must have written DLLs to this PC's drive. Darn. Meaning it does not sta= rt off a USB stick. But it has to because the laptop will have to get off t= he ground with a completely empty new hard drive.
It ought to work provided that you booted from the USB stick or CD. Otherwise all sorts of registry settings will end up in the machine registry of the OS that booted the system. The days when you could copy a program onto removable media and expect it to run are long gone.
If you count your time into the equation the quickest cheapest solution is buy a suitably big external HD and mirror the old portable drive onto it with Paragon already installed on the portable. Make the external HD the primary boot media to check it and then remove and replace the half dead drive. Mirror it back and you are done - at least in theory.
If the USB drive is big enough you could do the same with that but
64GB thumbnail drives are still a bit pricy so it's more expensive.
And even then it may still be more cost effective to buy a new portable. The cute 10" micro laptops are going for about =A3250 here for Xmas, and their bigger cousins for about =A3100 more for a decent specimen.
up to less than half the rpm and stays there (pretty constantly). After an hour of warm-up a power cycle usually brings it to life at full rpm. Sound like it'll croak soon. No XP disks came with this machine, meaning I must mirror :-(
A lot of disks came with it but not that one. There were these disks:
Client drivers WordPerfect DVD drivers Some Cyberlink DVD stuff Microsoft Money
There is a really long MS XP product key number but no XP CD.
must have written DLLs to this PC's drive. Darn. Meaning it does not start off a USB stick. But it has to because the laptop will have to get off the ground with a completely empty new hard drive.
I am afraid it did those registry entries without asking when I installed it on the stick.
Afraid it's too late. The laptop did not get off the ground this morning. The equivalent of finding a huge puddle of transmission fluid under your car :-(
I just bought a $500 version, arrived two days ago. Samsung NC-10, typed an OO document yesterday night. Remaining battery capacity 87%. Sweet!
--
Regards, Joerg
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If there wasn't a recovery CD, there's a good chance that either...
1) There's a recovery partition, and pressing some magical key combination like Ctrl+F11 at boot (this is what older Dells used) activates it. ...or...
2) There might be an option somewhere buried in the Start Menu that allows you to manually create a restore CD. I've used Sony laptops that were this way... either create your own restore CDs, or if you had to do a complete re-install, you called up Sony and forked over something like $30 for their copies. :-(
Ah, well, then the above it moot at this point. Hopefully you were able to backup her data files prior to the final death spiral?
I doubt she'll be unhappy with a new laptop for Xmas here... :-)
Except I always forgot the bookmarks because I don't use such stuff much myself. Dang.
Sure, but all she needs is email and web. And we don't like to throw things away if they can be repaired. I'll go look for a small low cost laptop drive. She never needed more than 1-2GB for data and pictures so there is no point in buying a $100 super-sized drive. Tonight I'll set up web mail access for her from the lab, that gives me some time to fix it. As luck has it work has piled up to right before Christmas.
--
Regards, Joerg
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There's an old wives tale that says refrigerate the drive for awhile. Then it should spin up long enough to extract a back-up.
I haven't tried it... I've always been lucky and heard the bearing noise early enough to get a back-up ;-)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine Sometimes I even put it in the food
Thanks. Although it did work better after warm-up but I may give that a shot. Might take a beer out. Just to make room for the drive, of course ...
This was the topper: Didn't want to boot, HD definitely spinning at less than half the rated rpm. _No_ warnings regarding the HD. This morning rrrrr-tat-tat-rrrr ... screeeeee ... and now it said "Imminent hard disk failure" on the screen. Great. I design my warning circuits and routines a wee bit better than that. Call from client: "The 2nd yellow LED is blinking sometimes but the unit works" ... "Your mains circuit may have surges on it" ... ... "Oh, that's probably why we had one of those function generators blow out this morning"
--
Regards, Joerg
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Thermal expansion is one method that might work, sure.
You can also unstick the heads by banging the side of the drive against a table (near the connector, edgeways rather than broadside). That causes a sudden angular acceleration of the case (and so the heads) with respect to the platters, and will frequently work. 'Taint a sure thing, but it's a lot better than giving up.
I seccond that suggestion (for next time). Joerg you should download the iso images for Knoppix, and maybe also Damn Small Linux livecds. If you learn how to use them, these can be very useful in situations like that. The dd command can be used to make images and restore them. I find much less problems with this approach than with commercial software like Ghost that likes to mess with the computer's hard drive.
The sharp rap on the side of the drive (as it's in the startup sequence
- won't work once it's given up trying to start) does sometimes work.
If you can get it to go at all, my experience is that they are often more likely to work when in a vertical orientation, so I often end up with laptops on edge while trying to slurp data out as they expire.
Once it's good and dead, get out your tiny torx (or buy a set, but don't spend too much) and open the drive for the head actuator magnet or magnets - nice toys, just watch your fingers. If you are either a true heathen or have a clean room you can try the final desperate measure of spinning the drive up by hand with the case open - given that this guarantees contaminating the drive, barring the cleanroom, it's a very desperate measure, and unlikely to work if the other methods have not worked.
Worst one I've had - drive that went to an equatorial country for a while. Tiny ants chewed through the rubber seal (between the lid and the case of the drive) and set up a nest inside the drive. I ziplocked, mothballed, and froze that one, but the drive was not recoverable (by normal folks with normal money to spend, anyway).
I'd suggest a slightly different last-ditch approach. Place the disk on a flat table surface, use one hand to hold it in a "straddle" grip (i.e. thumb on one long side and fingers on the other) and then give it a "snapping" rotation - twist the whole drive abruptly while holding it gently against the table surface.
This should generate a rotational torque (the momentum of the platter will tend to keep it from rotating, while the heads and mechanism body do rotate) and may break free "stuck" heads or a stuck/dry bearing. This approach minimizes horizontal or vertical shock which might further damage the heads.
Repeat a few times, then try powering it up.
--
Dave Platt AE6EO
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(My son has some _really_old_ drives that he uses as door-stops ;-)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine Sometimes I even put it in the food
For about $10 (perhaps less) there seem to be CF ATA (PATA, IDE) adapters available, which would solve your solid-state desire for less scratch than an ATA "sold state drive", based on non-extensive search.
I use a that setup or PCMCIA flash card for the main drive in a couple of of my favorite computers, and adapter+CF for removable storage.
One problem was finding a card the computers would boot from. Much trial and error ensued. Settled on a SanDisk unit for one, but needed another for the other.
Battery life is *greatly* increased, CF is rugged, way faster, and silent.
Flash wears out. An over-sized flash/CF + the wear-leveling algorithms these cards use reduces that problem considerably.
Dunno if you could get a CF large enough for current WinPigs though; I run DOS and Win3.1 on these '486 machines. For usual stuff they're MUCH faster than the
If the drive "eventually comes up to full rpm" then has anyone considered that it may be a laptop power supply issue?
Aside from that, one can get a laptop sized (2.5 inch) external USB enclosure, put one's new laptop hard drive in it, boot a Linux live CD like Knoppix DVD or such and copy the laptop drive to the USB drive, then, make the switch of the two and VIOLA! No need to spend all that money on a new laptop just because the one you have is experiencing a small problem with its storage device.
Not to mention the fact that this is not the 80's, these are not 5.25 inch behemoths driven by old through hole PCB assemblies with 18 read heads in the read arm array, and a hard drive has not had a "stuck head" in a couple of decades.
Unbelieveable what some claim-to-be technically trained folks will say, actually believing that they have any clue as to the actual workings of the device they profess to know something about.
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