OT laptop died

If you think the contents of the hard drive are intact -- you might consider hitting Best Buy Geek Squad (or the equivalent) and having them copy off as many files as possible. It may cost you a few dollars (like $100 or so) -- but depending upon what you may lose... may be well worth the price.

When my hard drive crashed (I did have warning) -- they were able to recover nearly 90 percent of everything (hundreds and hundreds of pictures, word docs, excel docs, my bookmarks and more!

Worth EVERY PENNY! (to me it was anyway!)

I can relate...hopefully you've backed everything up :)

-Irene

i dont know diddly squat about laptops and dd and her geek b/f have gone to the beach and/or hiking in the hills adjacent to the beach til probably around 7pm so no help from them.

i was wondering if you think the h/d is ok, can you remove it and try it in a desktop or other laptop to see if is still working. that said, will it negate your warrantee if you do that? hmmmmm, tricky one. i fiddle with the workings on this puter when needed. if its still under warrantee i call and they will walk me thru the workings to see what they think is wrong with it. what does happen when you try to reboot? is it a plain blue screen with nothing at all on it? does it have some text come up but wont boot the whole puter up? more info might give someone on here more chance of helping. i've done the blue screen but it was so long ago i forget now what was wrong, could of been needing to reload windows tho. that was when i found out i should never ever ever use the default folders on windows to save any files i might ever want to see again. if i reload windows the default folders will overwrite anything left in those and i'm toast. so now i always start up a new folder for Jeanne, then inside that put Quilting, Business, Family etc folders. not that it helped me this last time when the damn h/d died completely and it was out of warrantee. i'm convinced they build a lifetime just outside the warrantee time into the h/d and/or other parts on the puter so you have to buy more stuff...doing it just to drive us all bonkers. worked on me. boing boing boing!!!!! lost in cyberspace but that aint nuttin new, j.

"Kate G." wrote in message news:xvmdnaW7oIgxUe_anZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@comcast.com...

Haven't tried it with a laptop, but my standard "cure" for retrieving hard drive contents is to drop the drive into another machine as a second, "slave" disk, and then copy the data files to disk or CD.

Did your laptop come with a "rescue disk" that you can boot from, then get to the data files that way?

Kay

So I'ma saying:

I hesitate with Geek Squad now.

I had a HUGE paper due in one of my classes, and my desktop computer flat out refused to boot up. Got the wonderful Blue Screen of Death, no matter what I did. Called Geek Squad, and agreed to pay TWICE their rate so they could come and fix the issue. I KNEW it was a video problem based on what the error code was. I just didn't know enough about DOS to be able to fix it myself.

Geek Squad hijacked my computer for two weeks, taking it to their special rest home facility wherein they stare at racks and racks of computers and watch them grow dusty. When I finally got it back, I couldn't even get to the BSOD anymore; it simply wouldn't boot at all.

Geek Squad attached a lovely note saying that they kept trying over and over again to get the computer to misbehave, but that every time they started it, it booted up beautifully right away.

I kept it for several more weeks, trying to get it to work right. Never did. I still don't trust Geek Squad.

Anastasia

--who did end up doing well on the paper, but only after getting back an earlier, unrevised copy I had sent to a friend for opinions.

Geek Squad is one of those things that may be very good in some locations and not so great in others, depending on the people who are hired for it. When I had to get outside help for a computer problem, I went to a small, local business that has done work for our church. Of course, even there, I've heard that some of the employees are better than others. YMMV.

Julia in MN

When you get it back .... get an external hard drive and do regular backups. Lobo ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Delete the obvious to reply to me personally. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

DH can plug the hard drive into his computer at work, so we don't need to buy anything to get the data off it. We've now sent the computer back to the manufacturer, who thankfully accepted DH's explaination that it wasn't anything to do with the hard drive and allowed us to take it out of the machine, which they don't usually do and they will reformat it, but thankfully, it's not in their hands. They say they have a 3-5 day turn around, so fingers crossed I should have it back middle of the week after next.

Until I hear what the issue is, I've not wanted to do anything like install EQ6 on a different computer, don't want to use up my installs, which is rather frustrating.

Anne

We found the warrenty docs and it appears not, so were able to confirm the hard drive was ok and have now sent the computer off, minus hard drive.

It's very random behaviour, it gets to different points in the start up, then sometimes it blue screens such that it immediately reboots, other times it blue screens and you have to manually reboot, other times it gets stuck in another stage of the process. We played with all the various ways of starting up, which again exhibited fairly random behaviour. DH was able to use some logging tools which confirmed it wasn't windows and after he was able to see the hard drive on another computer, found he was able to boot from the hard drive. I guess it's just a waiting game now, the fastest we could ship it has it arriving on Monday with a 3-4 day turn around.

cheers Anne

we've never had much luck with this kind of people, DH is a techie, so usually has access to the same tools at work, he doesn't work in repair or maintenance, but even so he seems to get the same results, the only time we've found them helpful was when we didn't have access to any bits and bobs when we were living in Korea, my hard drive was taken out by a lightening strike and we were able to walk in to a HP shop (it was a HP laptop) and have it confirmed it was completely fried, replaced and windows installed within a few hours.

Anne