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Hard drive? or just XP?

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by sswifttiburon

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Well to start off, I have a Toshiba Satellite Series laptop. I got it about 9 months ago, had no problems with it whatsoever.

A few days ago, out of the blue, Windows started taking long to boot up...almost 20 minutes. When that happened all I could do was shut down the laptop or restart it; no hibernate or stand by anymore.

So that was going on for a few days and the computer worked okay.

Yesterday, the laptop wouldnt even boot up. I just got the Toshiba load up screen, and Windows XP wouldnt load. After 10 minutes, I got an error message saying a file is missing or corrupt.

I called tech support and all he told me was to put the recovery disc in and it should work. I dont think thatll work, because I hear this little "click, click, click" stop and then again the same sound. Ive had hard drives mess up before, and I think this might be an hd thing again.

What do you guys think? (sorry for the long post)

3 replies

by mjd420nova

Too bad you didn't back it up when the first problems occurred. That clicking is the clue. Most often the noise is caused by the drive heads trying to find the clock track and then moving to the area where the next data is needed to continue the operation it was doing when it lost sync and needed to go back to the clock track. Sometimes leaving the unit alone for an hour to let things warm up and then re-booting will get it functioning long enough to recover needed data. Good luck

by oh smeg

If you don't have a current backup you just may get by with following the directions above but I very much doubt it.

As this is only 9 months old it's a Warranty Repair so return it to the suppliers Repairer for repairs. If you need the data that is on the HDD it's going to cost you big time and you'll need to pull the HDD and send it away to a Data Recovery house to recovery your data and then when you get it back with the documentation from the Data Recovery House send the remains of the HDD with the damage report to the repairer and they should repair the NB.

However it's possible that the HDD Controller has died and not the HDD itself though not likely but you can try pulling the HDD fitting it to a USB Caddy and attaching it to another computer to attempt to read the drive. If that works copy all your data off the drive ASAP and then refit it to the NB and return it for repair.

Col

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