**** **** **** and bottoms

I dropped a laptop. Landed dead flat, but the HDD is screwed, I think. Only grinding noises, can’t detect it at boot on another machine.

Any ideas? Stick it in the freezer etc? It’s my girlfriend’s and she’s never backed anything up AFAIK….

She’s home in a couple of hours.

Did I mention ****?

Maybe one of these…

Sorry. No help here.

Dead man walking

time to fake? smash a window and say you were broke into. mugged in the back garden. or you cant remember where you put it then get it fixed asap tomorrow.. or be honest.

Is it visibly damaged?

If not put it back where you found it and keep schtum.

Edit:

Or sprinkle tiny bits of carrot around it and blame the bunnies… I reckon that big un could easily damage a laptop.

How close is the nearest florist?

oldnpastit – Member
How close is the nearest florist?

As he’s in Holland he can probably just reach out of his window and grab a massive handful of tulips

Are the grinding noises the hard disk or say the fan ? Was the computer running when you dropped it, if so it is more likely the disc is foo-barred. Have you taken the disk out to test it (possibly yes from what you say).

If she was precious about the data on it she would have backed it up, wouldn’t she.

“Let that be a lesson to you” is not perhaps how you should start the conversation, but it should be in there somewhere.

OK, this might work:

1. If you haven’t done so already, switch off the laptop
2. Remove the hard drive
3. Unscrew the small screws around the edge
4. *Very Carefully* remove the platters (round shiny metal discs)
5. With a fine cloth, clean them
6. Now, you should be able to attach the platters to an old earring and convert them into jewellery

Oldnpastit – I don’t know what is more cruel – the instructions or the act of giving hope that there is a way out of this.

Time for Girlfriend V2.0

Can you balance it precariously so it falls when she goes to pick it up?

Otherwise it’s a test of honesty and relationship strength.

Be really unlicky if it’s a glass platter hard disk, they really can shatter into tiny pieces of irretrievable data loss 🙁

That predictably, went down like a lead balloon.

I didn’t hark on about backups, just as well as she was really upset about some old photos etc. Luckily, we did find quite a lot of stuff backed-up on an external drive – I hope it’s all the important things. Certainly a set of tax returns are gone, eerk!

I am now making a backup of the backup before continuing. This is not to my back up drive, otherwise the my pc would back the backup backup up as well…

Oh, yes I also picked her a nice bunch of flowers, good tip that 🙂

How much is the data worth? I’ve used CBL Data Recovery for work hard drives and they’ve always managed to recover the data even when the drive appears totally broken. Charges have usually been £500-£1000 (sometimes less). They will check your drive and then give you a no obligation quote. If you don’t want to go ahead they just return your drive. I haven’t used then for a couple of years but doubt their service has changed much.

Replace the drive and restore from your backups. You have backups right?

Replace the drive and restore from your backups. You have backups right?

Did you get overexcited at being able to post a smug comment and forget to actually read the OP? Mid way through the OP:

It’s my girlfriend’s and she’s never backed anything up AFAIK….

OP is she submitted her tax returns electronically you can download them from the hmrc website

Have you tried removing and reinserting the HDD? tiny chance it may have just got dislodged slightly.

Yo.

HDD is FUBAR indeed – heads crashed into the platters. Sadly, the laptop never got the hang of going to sleep when the lid was closed in Mint, so when dropped it was spinning. Immediately the HDD light jammed on and there’s been nothing doing since – as mentioned it doesn’t even identify to the BIOS at boot any more and it’s certainly not possible to access it after boot with the laptop itself or when plugged into my desktop.

However… I do have a spare 160GB kicking around, so in it went and I have Mint XFCE back on it and W7 .iso burning as you read this.

The question of how much has been lost remains.

@Alphabet – thanks for the tip – I doubt it’s necessary for us, but that’s slightly less than I thought actually 🙂

@ everyone else – thanks, eeer, mostly 😉

PS – this also inspired me to run me SMART diagnostics on all my internal drives on the desktop – all seems OK but my gods the original ones have now done a lot of hours since I built it – many of the attributes report waaay overspec time online, but with no read/write errors or reallocated bits. Hmmm….

I think the real horror here is you know enough about computers to swap drives and run linux, but you’re still running spinning HDDs like an animal. 😉

Bit bolting-the-stable-door, but maybe you could replace her dead HDD with a nice fast SSD (cheap these days) and a portable HDD for (automated!) backups? Cost you <£100 all in, might go someway to making amends…

I appreciate your concern, IA, but if you real close you’ll spot an M500 in there. 😛

Sadly, a hundred quid is impossible – flowers and a repair is all I can do right now.

A 250 SSD is about £65 for a good brand. Backup can be done to cloud for important stuff? OP a free online photo storage service is well worth setting up

Sadly, the laptop never got the hang of going to sleep when the lid was closed in Mint

not saying nothing. 🙂

OK – bar a bootloop after installing grub [fixed with this] we’re back to a generic dual boot OS setup.

Next issue to overcome is managing to activate W7 and I also need to start the loooooooooong W7 update process. I have only a “preinstalled” manufacturer key [was not valid to download windows from MS’ site]…

Sadly, the laptop never got the hang of going to sleep when the lid was closed in Mint

not saying nothing. [/quote]
Yeah, I regret not fixing that now 🙁

Oh boy here we go….. 😀

Not gone straight to 10?

W10 is not going on this machine – her orders and mine too [something’s gotta drive the scanner 😛 ]

…made it as far as update 79 of 231.

What I can’t get out of my head is how much easier is is to get Mint running. Basically you install it, and it figures the rest out itself [bar the sleep when closed function]. Windows OTOH was not happy to download with a Sony supplied key, then screwed GRUB up, then I had to start installing chipset and WiFi drivers – then Update was b0rked, then finally we’re off with 1,001 hours of updates.

Put it this way – if it was a dual Mint install I’d have finished by midday!

gfs- I agree how easy modern linux distros are compared to win 7…

However I’ve dropped a Win10 HD from one laptop into a completely different laptop – and it boots – runs fine – 20 mins on the reboot and it sorts out all the different / new drivers.

Colour me impressed.

Windows OTOH was not happy to download with a Sony supplied key, then screwed GRUB up,

It’s way easier to do it the other way around IMlimitedE. The last time I installed a dual-boot Ubuntu install it went “oh, you’ve got Windows, would you like to dual-boot?” and Just Worked.

I’ve dropped a Win10 HD from one laptop into a completely different laptop – and it boots – runs fine – 20 mins on the reboot and it sorts out all the different / new drivers.

You can typically get away with this with modern Windows OSes so long as you don’t change CPU architectures (Intel / AMD). I’ve never tried with W10 TBF but prior versions tend to get a bit BSODy.

I usually do it the other way around, but there was something funny going on after I partitioned the disk with gparted – I was able to install Mint, but the Windows installer would NOT install onto the ntfs part I had already made, no idea why, so I figured make the drive all unallocated, install Windows, then shrink the partition and use the space leftover for mint, data etc etc. Mint fix’d before she came home was the idea- I just knew if it was all together again and working I’d not lose my kernals, just my escalated privileges 😉

If HPET and ACHI setting are the same in the BIOSes, (and as Cougar points out the Arch/chipset) then windows often recovers from a computer swap.

I have promised I will buy her an SSD when I have some money, still broke as hell out here in NL, you should see how worn my chain etc is getting….

Thats all gobbledygook….

What you really wanted to say was…

haha

sorry guys