I think my computer died this morning. My husband was on it, and got an illegal operation. He restarted and it only goes to the blue HP screen. The hard drive has been slightly noisier lately, so I'm guessing that is the problem.
We're such computer addicts and so broke ... we went to Rent-A-Center and rented one. It's a much better computer, but I want my bookmarks and personal stuff back from my old computer. (Yeah, I realize my chances of getting stuff off a dead hard drive are not good at all.)
I guess it's a good thing I only had 1118 words so far on my NaNoWriMo novel. I have a printout, so I can type that back in and go from there. It's just such a pain, though. Some of the photos I took with my digital camera will be gone forever.
[ November 08, 2004, 01:30 PM: Message edited by: CaySedai ]
Posted by Jonathan Howard (Member # 6934) on :
My condolenses. I don't know what to do. Good luck!
Jonathan Howard
Posted by CaySedai (Member # 6459) on :
Thanks. I'm not giving up on the old one just yet. Maybe a new hard drive ... or newer, anyway, can bring it back to life. The problem is the files I wanted to keep, like photos and genealogy.
But ... I've got a Sunday School lesson to prepare and I work tonight, so I will be getting off here shortly.
Posted by Boris (Member # 6935) on :
I had the same problem a couple days ago. I have three hard drives (Two were working together as my main and the third for backup), so it didn't affect me too much. BTW, go to Newegg if you want to just replace your hard drive. It's probably cheaper than the rental fees for a computer ($65 for an 80 gig drive I think). Of course, it may actually be your RAM that's screwed up...If you can open up the rental computer, you can hook the hard drive from the busted computer up to it. HP's are a pain to open sometimes. You need to open up the left side panel and take a look on the inside. If the drive bay is one solid piece, there is a tab at the top that will let you pull the whole bay out the front. If there are two parts to the bay, there's a tab just about the floppy drive that will let you swing just the floppy and hard drive out of the computer. Remove the cables from the hard drive. Open up the rental, unplug the cables from your CD/DVD rom drive(s) and plug in your old hard drive (You actually don't have to worry about physically putting the drive in there, and the cables should be keyed to fit in only one way. Make sure you put the drive on a solid, non-moving area though). If your rental computer won't boot with the old hard drive in it, it's definately dead. If it does boot, you can drag anything you want off of it in Windows. Good luck. (Try this only if you really really want that stuff on the hard drive back, otherwise, it isn't worth the effort)
Posted by Synesthesia (Member # 4774) on :
If you need a new computer there are places that custom build one for cheaper than Dell and stuff. You'd have to install all the programs yourself though... Shame internetishop went out of business. They went downhill from when I bought from them.
Posted by Goody Scrivener (Member # 6742) on :
Considering some of the things you mention as being on your hard drive, you may want to look into a data recovery service. I have no idea what they cost, just that they exist, but if there's any way of saving your pictures, etc., and plugging the hard drive into the rental computer won't work, they may be able to do it.
Posted by Boris (Member # 6935) on :
DO NOT LOOK INTO DATA RECOVERY!!! It's about 50 dollars a meg to recover data from a hard drive.
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
Opening a rental computer sounds like a bad idea.
If you're paying to rent a computer, is there any way you can get a comp on a loan and make the same payments but own it at the end?
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
It sounds to me like your computer is almost certainly not dead; it also sounds, based on what you've described, that your data is recoverable.
If you don't want to take your PC to a repair center, I'd be happy to try to recover the data on your drive if you send it to me. If you're interested, drop me an E-mail and I'll send you my snailmail address.
Posted by CaySedai (Member # 6459) on :
My husband says a friend is going to help him try to recover the data. I'm hoping his dad will help us buy a new computer for Christmas. And, I'm going to try cleaning the computer - it's very dusty in there. Who knows, it just might work.
We've passed the first hurdle with the rental - figuring out that when you set up separate desktops with Windows XP, you have to set up the user permissions. Kent couldn't install programs in his profile, but the main one could. Once he actually let me back on the computer, it took less than 1 minute for me to find the user profiles and give him administrator access. Sheesh. Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
I would suggest that if he couldn't find and/or didn't know about administrator access, you shouldn't've given it to him. Posted by Goody Scrivener (Member # 6742) on :
Wow Boris, I had no idea it was that expensive! Is that per recoverable megabyte or total potential disk storage? <mind boggles either way>
Posted by Boris (Member # 6935) on :
It's per megabyte recovered. Mostly that's from a completely dead hard drive. The equipment and software they use to do it costs upwards of 10 thousand dollars. If the drive still starts up, it's easy to just pull everything off it in windows, but if the mechanics of a drive die, it takes some working to get things off of it, and the guys who do it REALLY know what they're doing.
Posted by CaySedai (Member # 6459) on :
TomDavidson: other than helping my mom with her computer a few times, this is my/our first experience with XP. He just wanted to be able to download and install IGames so he can play spades with the other Internet kiddies. The people at the rental place apparently have no experience with using XP with multiple users, so they didn't realize you have to set up permissions.
The nice part is that I've set up desktops for the kids - and those are limited. Posted by quidscribis (Member # 5124) on :
I had a client (idiot) who backed up his data - all of it, including financial - to the same hard drive the original data was on (against my repeated advice to have backups separate from hard drive and offsite). Figured nothing could go wrong, and at least he had a backup, right?
Then his hard drive had a melt down. He took it to one of those hard drive recovery places, which quoted him $5000 to recover his data. The motor for the hard drive had stopped working or some such thing.
He, instead, opted to have staff members re-key the data in. Ended up costing him the same amount of money over a six month period and resulted in shoddy quality. He had a government tax audit a few months later. The guy was in Big Trouble. Cost him a heckuva lot more than the $5000 the data recovery company wanted. It would have been way cheaper in the long run to go that route.
Oh, this would be a total derail, hey?
Posted by Joldo (Member # 6991) on :
Was it a good computer? If so, I suggest sending it out to sea on a burning boat. And then we can hold a seance on Hatrack to recover your data.
Posted by Boris (Member # 6935) on :
This is why they charge so much to restore. For businesses, it's cheaper to recover it than recreate it.
Posted by CaySedai (Member # 6459) on :
Well, maybe the computer isn't exactly dead after all ...
Kent got it running this morning. We have no idea what the problem was, but we'll be backing up the important stuff ASAP. The IBM we rented was already having problems, so he took it back and brought back a new-in-the-box Dell. Since we've already paid for one week, with a free week, we'll keep it for two weeks. This will be a trial run, then when we get the money for a new one, we can decide if we want a Dell.
I already like it - it came with WordPerfect suite!
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