Tecchie help

haffies

Can anyone help? I bought my son a Dell lap top approx 2 years ago 9 months later I had to claim the warranty and get a dell repair man in as there was a problem with the hard drive-can't remember what was wrong think he may have replaced this. I do remember he had to reinstall all the drivers etc. It has now developed another fault something to do with kernels? I took it to our local repair shop and they have quoted me £140 to replace the hard drive. Is this a standard price to replace a hard drive and is it worth it? Also if the hard drive needs replaced will he have lost all his music, pics etc or are they retrievable. Thanks

closed

depends on the size, but they don't normally cost that much, you will be paying for their time too.

if it really does need to be replaced, you've lost it unless you are willing to pay a specialist £100's to recover them

it may not be a hardware fault at all, in which case a windows reinstall or factory restore will cure it, which you can do yourself - but you will need to buy a usb caddy to get your data off first.

debitcardmayhem

What makes the local man think it's a hard drive failure ? If it gives messages about kernels , then there must be life in the drive at least. Perhaps you should try and start it up and post exactly what messages are being displayed

robmar0se

As the last poster said, we don't know enough o give you a definitive answer. If you brought it to me and the error indicated probable drive problem, I would (i) check the drive condition, if it had bad sectors, I would generally recommend replacement (ii) recover what data I could and install Windows on a new drive as below(ii) there are occasions that the drive becomes inaccessible by normal means, then there is an option to send it to specialists to recover data, but this costs £100's usually.

If it didn't have bad sectors, I would then re-install Windows and return it to you as it came from the factory, usually with all updates complete, antivirus installed, and other usual utilities installed, plus anything else you specifically wanted; and put the data back.

In the first case, costs can vary depending on the size of the drive but to replace the drive and re-install windows - probably in the £100-£120 (there have been problems of late with hard drives as a significant volume are manufactured in Thailand, the recent floods have disrupted supply - prices almost tripled overnight, but are coming back down now).

Cost without a new drive probably in the £40-£50 range.

One caveat: errors given by Windows aren't always conclusive, what appears to be a hard drive error, can be caused by other things - I am assuminhg here that the it is specifically a hard drive issue.

TakeThis

Even if you had to replace the hard drive...and I don't think that you do; with our help you could buy and fit the drive yourself(Relatively simple. You could (and should)probably do it yourself in fifteen minutes) and reinstall Windows and Drivers without cost.
A caddy, as closed suggests, costs around £5. That will allow you to save all of your son's files to another computer before your proceed.
So the job can cost anything from £5(for a caddy) to £60(for a caddy and a new hard drive) if you choose to do it yourself.

The extra quoted cost is for the labour and perhaps work warranty of the technician. But we don't know if there is a problem with the hard drive. Nor do we know if he includes the cost of backing up and restoring your data.

Let's begin with the full model or preferably the Service Tag.

PhoenixDF

haffies wrote: »

Can anyone help? I bought my son a Dell lap top approx 2 years ago 9 months later I had to claim the warranty and get a dell repair man in as there was a problem with the hard drive-can't remember what was wrong think he may have replaced this. I do remember he had to reinstall all the drivers etc. It has now developed another fault something to do with kernels? I took it to our local repair shop and they have quoted me £140 to replace the hard drive. Is this a standard price to replace a hard drive and is it worth it? Also if the hard drive needs replaced will he have lost all his music, pics etc or are they retrievable. Thanks

I'm sorry, but I can't assist you properly without knowing more information about the computer system, the error message and what loads up on your computer at the moment.

Kernel errors usually relate to the system encountering a fatal error, so they system will take a memory dump and shutdown or even restart itself to try and resolve the issue.

£140 is a price quoted that includes the time and labour more than anything for this situation and 9 times out of 10 if the hard drive does need to be replaced the engineer will dispose of the broken one or if there re-installing windows they may wipe the data without a backup (depends on the person).

If you can explain the whole situation a little clearer, there are alot of us here to help you

googler

Look at Amazon, eBay, any computer parts supplier online to get a price of a Hard Drive.

Look on YouTube or search for instructions on how to replace it, assuming you have the install discs for Operating System, Drivers, etc

Keep the old drive and put it in a caddy to get the data off it.

You should be able to do all this for way less than £100 plus some learning time.

haffies

Sorry I have not responded however I have just picked up the unrepaired laptop from the repair shop today. In response to replies - it is a Dell Inspiron 1545 model no PP41L. When I start it up there is a window that opens called Window Boot Manager. It advises me to insert the windows installation disc and restart the computer. At the bottom of the page it has a heading with - \Windows\system32\ntkrnlpa.exe. Status Oxc0000221. Info - Windows failed to load because the kernel is missing or corrupt.
I have the windows Drivers & Utilities disc, Dell application disc & the operating system disc.
Any help would be greatfully received

Spank

Even if it does need replacing, as the new hard drive is less than 2 years old it's probably still under warranty.

CrazyRed

All that is is a fairly simple Windows corruption. By the sounds of it your hard-drive isn't goosed (but there is a caveat, see below)...

Just pop the Dell CD in that's marked "Operating system" (on my daughter's Inspiron 1545 it was a black label) and let Windows do it's stuff.

The "kernel" referred to in the error message is the core part of Windows itself, that's why it won't load. It COULD be caused by a bad sector on a hard-drive, but first of all let's get Windows to start then we can worry about running tests.

Once Windows starts (it'll boot from the Dell disc) then run CHKDSK from the Start>Run Menu and see if that reports any hard-drive errors. If it does, then back up the data, pictures, music etc., as advised above (at a pinch you can back it all up to USB Memory sticks, but you'll probably need a few!) and come back here for further advice.

One other possibility is, of course our old friend a virus. Once Windows has booted, run a virus scan and a Malwarebytes Quick Scan to ensure there's no nasties lurking.

Hope this helps

haffies

Hi thanks for that. I put the windows installation disc in (it was purple) and pressed enter however the Windows Boot Manager appeared and stated the same message at the bottom of the page as before. The message at the top stated Windows failed to start ?