please help laptop won't work, lost uni work

rhosynbach

hi can anyone help please. my daughters acer laptop will not work the on of button was sticking so not sure if that is anything to do with it but now when we turn it on we have the acer symbol up, and it says preparing to boot then it goes to a blank screen with a line at the top flashing, we can press f2 at the start and get on the setup but no further, she is on her last year at uni and if she does not get her work in will fail so it is pretty desperate,,

can anyone please suggest anythink we can try

many thanks

gonzo127

well it doesnt sound like the hard drive is knackered at th emoment as its booting up so far (although how far in is the acer symbol? if its right at the start before anything else this could eb a worry), so a interim option to get her work off before she trys fixing it properly would be as follows

get someone (if at uni one of her friends) to download and burn ubuntu instructions and files here http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download

once the cd (or usb stick depending on which way you want to do it) is finished pop it into the laptop and boot up then use 'TRY UBUNTU' do not go to install, if you are using the cd this will boot the computer up from the cd and your systems ram - this is not always fast but does not make any changes to your hard drive so is ideal for this type of situation - once it has fully booted up you will be able to go onto her hard drive and then you can back up all her work

then you can start on fixing the problem

Notmyrealname

Assuming you do the above and no joy then only thing you can do is to get an external caddy, put the laptop hard drive in that and see if it can be read on another computer.

If it can't, you're looking at sending it off to a proper data recovery company like Retrodata who typically charge around £500 per 20GB. If it is really important stuff and the hard drive isn't being read on another machine, do not use software to try and recover it yourself or use a shop or mickey mouse company who only use pretty much the same software you could as you are more likely to cause data corruption than recover stuff.

A good lesson in backing up is just about to be learnt the hard way I guess.

Lifeforms

Do you have any indications that the HDD is still working? IE do you have a HDD light on the laptop?

Do you have a recovery CD/DVD that you can put in try and repair windows? (not reformat! If you get option to reformat consider the next paragraph(s) first)

Is the uni work on the main HDD, was the HDD partitioned (ie C drive and D drive, and if so is the uni work saved on the D driver?)

If it's out of warranty, or if you are really really desperate to get the work off, before you want to mess around trying to reformat and reinstall/revert then seriously consider taking out the HDD, go get a suitable caddy off ebay/amazon/computer component site, and seeing if you can get access to the HDD that way.

If the HDD is dead, then basically highly doubtful in getting info off easily. Prolly would be up to a Data Recovery company (expensive software/job) How much is an Education worth?

If you have access to the HDD through a caddy, and can get the data off, then you can do that, put the HDD back in, and see about getting it fixed/installed/running again.

Chicken and Egg, what do you want most, the data off, or the laptop working firstly?

By and By, removing the HDD whilst under Warranty will invalidate it, so take that into consideration.

Just my opinion of course, that's how I'd go ahead with it, but someone else might be able to come along and suggest a magic button to press, or something else to try

Edited cus of crossed posts, you could give the ubuntu solution a try first, before taking the laptop apart! Just as said don't install, you don't want to overwrite any data at all. Boot from CD only

closed

hold down the power button for 10 seconds (or remove battery and power cord at the same time)

if that doesn't work, try safe mode (hold down F8 at boot)

if that doesn't work, buy a usb 2.5" hard disk caddy (if it's a newish machine, it will be a sata type), stick the hard disk in, and get the data off - they cost under £5

If you do any windows reinstallations of any type on c:, you will probably lose the data (assuming it was stored there)

pogofish

Before doing anything else, I would suggest you try this - That way, you can recover and secure any readable data on another machine.

Notmyrealname wrote: »

Assuming you do the above and no joy then only thing you can do is to get an external caddy, put the laptop hard drive in that and see if it can be read on another computer.

If it can't, you're looking at sending it off to a proper data recovery company like Retrodata who typically charge around £500 per 20GB. If it is really important stuff and the hard drive isn't being read on another machine, do not use software to try and recover it yourself or use a shop or mickey mouse company who only use pretty much the same software you could as you are more likely to cause data corruption than recover stuff.

A good lesson in backing up is just about to be learnt the hard way I guess.

Then learn to do regular backups.

Laz123

If you need to recover data use PC Inspector free http://www.pcinspector.de/default.htm?language=1

macman

Surely she has a backup of her critical files though?
Transferring the drive to a USB caddy is the first step if not, copy the files over if the drive is still mounting OK. If it's not, then you are looking at a bill of several hundred for possible forensic recovery.
Has she tried using the recovery disk?

GunJack

rather than bot from ubuntu, use hiren's bootcd first - the miniXP mode is windows-based, and so will be easier for someone who's used to windows to copy the files off onto a usb stick. If miniXP won't read the hdd, then I'd try a linux-based distro