HELP! LAPTOP CRASHED

David -

Microsoft crashed my PC yesterday. I know the pain you're going through. My recommendation? STOP. Don't touch it at all, because usually in the attempt to save data, people end up loosing more.

Allow Dell, or another professional data recovery service to get the harddrive. They'll get your data back. I've seen them do some amazing things.

 

Yea you might be screwed!!!!

(Shameless plug below)

Should have gotten' a Mac!!!

 

I just went to sam's club and bought a second hard drive as a back-up. It was only 99$, 800 GB or something like that. My laptop is only 20 gb. The drive came with some type of back up program...

Basically I was looking to copy my entire drive, so if it crashes, I can restore it in its entirety...not sure if thats what I did or not...

But what I do know is that it took 16 FRICKEN HOURS to do the back-up!!! I doubt I will be doing THAT frequently...

I would think that doing back-ups like this once a week would lead to premature HDD failure. The laptop HDD was going nuts, working hard, for 16 hours!!!

Is this normal? Is there a faster way???

 

Bo - That is too long. How is the second harddrive attached? USB 2.0? Firewire? I use a Seagate 300GB external drive for backups. I can backup 30GB worth of data (my main PC) in about 15 minutes. The first backup will always be the slowest; each sucessive one will only be the "net change" files. At least that's how my software works... (I use something called "BounceBack" that came with the drive)

-Daniel

 

I have a 100 Gb HD for back up. My g4 is only 80 Gb but it took about 30 min to back up the 50 Gb I have used so far. It connects by Fire wire.

16 hours is WAY too long.

 

Its a usb connection...odd.

I wonder if the virus protection software is doing something odd!!!

 

Ok... I may be able to give some advice. I deal with this kinda stuff every day of the week.

To start off, I need to know exactly how the hard-drive died. There is several ways that the computer would no longer be able to access the HD. For example, the MFT could have become corrupted, which would make the machine think that there was no data on the drive. This can happen without actually losing any data or hardware integrity in the drive. If a piece in the hard-drive actually broke (such as the reading arm or the motor), thats much more of a serious problem. There will be nothing you can do as, even though the interface between the physical disks and the motherboard on the machine may be functioning properly, a physical failure will prevent any accessing of the data.

Neither of those failures will result in data loss unless there is damage done to the platters themselves, and even that would normally result in only a small loss of data. Just about the only things that could result in total data loss are strong magnetic fields, electrical shock (this can create that magnetic field in the right circumstance), burning the drive with a blowtorch, or, if done incorrectly, like has been said already, trying to recover the data from the bad drive.

You said that you were on the phone with dell... they most likely had you run some onboard diagnostics. Do you remember any error codes that you may have gotten in regards to the hard-drive? Do you remember if the drive passed the short DST test?

Ask the local store you took it to what kind of methods they used to try and get your data back. There are a few different ways to try and do it that not everyone necessarily knows. I may be able to recommend some other way of doing it if they didn't try hard enough.

If the drive doesn't have any broken pieces, you may want to check all the other components in your laptop to make sure that they are operating correctly. A huge culprit of causing supposed 'failures' is actually your RAM modules. If they are going bad, that can actually cause bad data to be written back to the crucial areas of the hard-drive, like the MFT (Master File Table), MBR (Master Book Record), etc. If any of that corrupted data is there, you can get the same symptoms of hard-drive failure.


As for the 16 hours part for backing up... The only reason that a backup would take that long would be that one of the hard-drives is going bad. It could be either the source drive or the destination drive. (Speaking of which... you think you could let us all know where you got that 800 GB hard-drive for $99 from? I may have to go pick up a few hundred of them... hehehe). Even if you are running it on a USB 1.1 port, it shouldn't take any more then 3 hours (thats being generous) to backup a completely full 20 gig hard-drive (which yours most likely is not unless you have a looooooot of uncompressed pictures, videos, games, music, etc...).

Anyways, thats probably enough right now... I don't want to bombard you with too much to start off with.

 

Would 80 gb sound more correct? It was 99$ at Sam's Club...

 

This won't help you, but one of my companies sells mostly high-end computers to businesses, and we've had TWO that were major customers of Dell that were unhappy and switched to us even though our prices were a little higher. Dell has used some lower end/lower quality stuff in order to be lower end in the price range...

 

It may be USB v1 instead of USB 2.0 which is MANY times faster.

Also, it will help if you defrag your hard drive aprox once a month or at least once a quarter.

 

This link will help in the long run!!!!




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