Reviving Dead Laptop HD?

[Russ Filtz]

Wife's HD crashed, nothing on there to save, but I tried! Plugged it into a SATA to USB converter and got to see the directory structure once, but it kept freezing my desktop. Laptop is out of warranty and I tried the manufacturer's recover disk to no avail.

If I get a new harddrive, are there any extra tricks you need to know for a laptop over a desktop? other problem is i only received a recovery disk with the "image" of the original install, not the actual Windows disks. It also seems like there may be a protected partition as it's a 160G HD and the recovery disk would only let me see and reformat a 140G partition. Would the operating system be on the hidden 20, or the 140G partition?

I know how to build PC's from scratch, just never messed with a laptop! :o

[Curt Harms]

Sorry to hear about your crash. The recovery disk should restore a new HD to new machine configuration. Unfortunately it will also include any crapware/trialware installed when the machine was purchased. It's too late for this machine but imaging software is really useful in these situations. Create one image when the machine is new, another image with applications installed and yet another image of ongoing current configuration & data. DVD-Rs are cheap. If a HD pukes, install a new one you have the choice of any of the configurations without chasing down utilities/drivers/apps. Why not just restore the most recent configuration? If that image contains a nasty, you don't want to restore the nasty too.

HTH

Curt

[Gary Click]

I am very paranoid about data loss. On my laptop I carry a copy of every drawing we have ever produced, every metallugrical report, tens of thousands of photos, etc. on a 160GB primary drive and a 80GB secondary drive. Loss of this data is not an option.

To guard against this I also use an office desktop and every day I am in the office the two computers are sync'ed using LapLink. This takes only a minute or so and when finished the two computers are mirror images of each other. The desktop also has a 1TB Maxtor Backup drive that does autobackups every second day. The chances of losing all three is not very great unless the office is nuked while I am there and then it's something I can live with or not.

gary

[Russ Filtz]

Well got hosed on the warranty replacement. Called Fujitsu and even though this HD has a 3-yr warranty, it's limited to the original laptop warranty of 1-yr. Laptop tech also confirmed that the recovery disk should work fine on any other HD I buy. So I upgraded from a 160G to a 400G at Newegg for $90.

I actually bought Acronis backup software a long time ago, but have never bothered to use it! Guess I better start with my desktop as it is getting several years old now since the last build. Usually I let crashes force me to start with a clean install as usually I don't have anything important on there. What little I do is copied to USB drives or CD/DVD. Don't bother to image the whole thing. Takes a LOT of DVDs with the large HDs these days to do that. I think i have 500G in my main PC now.