Laptop Woes

My wife’s Dell Inspiron won’t boot from hard drive.

It hangs if you try and boot it in repair mode.

If you try and boot it from a Vista boot cd it starts but all you ever get is a mouse pointer (that moves with mouse commands) and no actual windows desktop – just a black screen.

I’ve run the BIOS based disk disgnostics and it’s coming up with loads of bad blocks.

Question I have is, is it worth persevering and trying to repair the disk – I have an Ubuntu cd and have read that you can run fdisk from a shell on a windows disk even if you’ve only booted from ubuntu on a cd (it will boot ubuntu off the cd and seems to run fine with it).

or do I just get a new hard drive for £40 off ebay and reload everything.

Most of her important stuff is on Dropbox so it wouldn;t be the end of the world but there’s probably some stuff that she’d miss like shortcuts in IE etc.

What I’d do, and indeed did last week, is:

Buy a new disk.

Attempt to clone the old partition onto the new one using Acronis / Easeus / Linux boot disc etc.

If it works, rejoice; if it fails, comme ci comme ca, rebuild.

would I need an external cradle to do that?

For a laptop? Yes, or just an adapter.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bipra-SATA-Adapter-Power-Drive/dp/B001A5SK56 (or about a hundred others similar)

Unless you can stick both drives in a donor PC temporarily, anyway.

TBH though, if it’s going to be a faff for you then I wouldn’t bother. The chances of it cloning successfully are fairly low, it’s just worth a punt if it’s straight-forward to do. If you’re happy with a rebuild, just go for that.

thanks, may just go with the rebuild I think – will see what my wife says…

Just to be clear,

You need to replace the drive and rebuild, not just do it in situ. The disk is knackered and needs defenestrating.

I’d be wary of eBay disks, personally. You might end up with one that’s in the same state as the one you’ve got. Another £15 will get you something really nice. Eg,

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/500gb-western-digital-wd5000bpkt-scorpio-black-25-95-mm-sata-3gb-s-7200rpm-16mb-cache

yes, was going to get a new disk, not try and rebuild old.

saw the ebay ones were brand new Western Digital so thought might be ok and they were the right ones for this make/model – it’s only a 160gb in there now. I’ll get the old one out and try and match with the one you linked to.

thanks for the advice.

Assuming the old one is SATA, any 2.5″ disk should work. The one I linked to is a 7200rpm disk; higher performance but potentially more power usage / heat. I saw a decent speed improvement on my laptop going from 5400 to 7200, but if the other criteria are an issue you might want to stick with a (more common) 5400 disk.

ta

Rudely intruding on another’s thread, but a relevant question: has anyone tried (notebook) harddrives with an SSD cache?

Managed to recover a similar problem with disk with Paragon disk image – which is free.
Told it to backup the drive and ignore errors – it managed it .
Then did a restore to new drive (does not have to be same size)

You need another system to run Paragon on and a caddy to put the old/new drives in + enough space to backup the old drive.

Update: managed to get it booted in Ubuntu from CD and copied most of her data off the drive to an external one.

New hard disk arriving today.

This time I won’t believe that all her data is on Dropbox and will set up backups to the NAS 🙁