Help me fix a Horlicks I made!

MarcLister

MarcLister

MarcLister

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A colleague's laptop stopped booting up a while back. Having been busy with other jobs at work I've only just now had time to properly look at the laptop.

We worked out that there was some corruption going on and that the best thing for us to do (we're a school) was to reload XP on as nothing I did to try and get the laptop to boot would work. We told the teacher whose laptop this is that he'd lose all his files. My boss doesn't want me to take the HDD out because that would invalidate the warranty. If this didn't matter I'd just take the hard drive out and place it into our external HDD caddy and get the files off that way and wipe the disk ready for a new install of XP.

There is a hidden partition on the laptop however clever old me got confused and tired one Friday two weeks back and I 'forced' the wrong kind of recovery software onto the machine. It was for another laptop for another colleague and now I'm unable to get the proper recovery software to work because when I press F9 to activate the recovery process it goes into the process for the other laptop make. :o

I'm pretty confident that what I did won't have deleted the hidden partition, correct me if I am wrong though, and what I've been thinking of is to use a bootable CD/USB pen drive running something like Ultimate Boot CD/System Boot CD/CloneZilla/TuxBoot to either recover the hidden partition manually (can I actually do this?!) or to wipe the disk completely and install XP fresh from the recovery CD. Would this work?

As it so happens another colleague has the very same laptop so I've arranged, if all else fails, to borrow her laptop on Thursday (for some reason she won't be in ;)) so that I can use CloneZilla to clone the hidden partition on her laptop, copy it to a USB stick and then copy it back onto the original laptop and hope that works and the recovery CD works properly this time.

So what I'm asking for is any advice on sorting this out. If it isn't possible to do what I'm thinking then perhaps some suggestions on what to do would be very helpful. Apparently the warranty ends in a few weeks so if this doesn't work I'd be tempted to take the HDD and wipe it clean and see if that works. If it doesn't and the HDD itself is damaged then I think we have a spare laptop sized HDD somewhere that we can place into the laptop.
 
Oh balls! :o I knew I'd forgotten to say something. I tried that once I realised what I had done. There was some kind of problem with the install. The XP install process would start and be loading all the files when all of a sudden there'd be a momentary flicker of a blue screen and the laptop restarts. I tried it several times again to make sure it wasn't a one-off but I got the impression that there's something wrong with the disc itself. Would something like System Rescue CD or Ultimate Boot CD allow me to run a chkdsk scan on the drive and fix any problems that way AND then do the OEM Media/key fresh install trick?
 
Nope. We only have XP x86. SATA controller drivers is a good idea. Not sure why I didn't think of that! I can't remember if there's anything on AHCI/IDE but I will look at that tomorrow. Would I be right in saying that until XP actually tries to install it shouldn't blue screen whilst its loading up to install? I.e. the only reason a blue screen would take place during setup prior to install is if there's some setting out of joint?
 
MarcLister said:
Nope. We only have XP x86. SATA controller drivers is a good idea. Not sure why I didn't think of that! I can't remember if there's anything on AHCI/IDE but I will look at that tomorrow. Would I be right in saying that until XP actually tries to install it shouldn't blue screen whilst its loading up to install? I.e. the only reason a blue screen would take place during setup prior to install is if there's some setting out of joint?
Click to expand...

Are you sure theres no hardware issue?
For example have you ran memtest to see if there are any RAM issues.?
 
MarcLister said:
Nope. We only have XP x86. SATA controller drivers is a good idea. Not sure why I didn't think of that! I can't remember if there's anything on AHCI/IDE but I will look at that tomorrow. Would I be right in saying that until XP actually tries to install it shouldn't blue screen whilst its loading up to install? I.e. the only reason a blue screen would take place during setup prior to install is if there's some setting out of joint?
Click to expand...

TBH that sounds more like a hardware issue than a problem with software. I'd get the ram checked if you haven't allready with something like memtestx86 and maybe check the HDD out with the manufacturers software (e.g. Western Digital Data Lifeguard) or similar
 
ManCuBuS said:
Are you sure theres no hardware issue?
For example have you ran memtest to see if there are any RAM issues.?
Click to expand...
No idea tbh. I've been busy with data handling and summer production work so I've had really minutes at a time to have a look. I'll give Memtest a run. For a laptop with 1GB RAM how long are we looking at for Memtest to run? It's an Asus 1001P netbook.

cokecan72 said:
TBH that sounds more like a hardware issue than a problem with software. I'd get the ram checked if you haven't allready with something like memtestx86 and maybe check the HDD out with the manufacturers software (e.g. Western Digital Data Lifeguard) or similar
Click to expand...
Lovely, will do. :)
 
If the laptop wasn't booting, and you're getting blue screens when installing the media and it reboots, it sounds to me like a hardware issue.
 
MarcLister said:
Hmm my boss was pretty sure that removing the underside of the laptop would invalidate the warranty. I'll have to check up on that.
Click to expand...

Usually the HDD will be located under a small access panel on the underside of the laptop. 1 or 2 screws and it should pop right off.

As Burnsy said, it shouldn't void the warranty at all
 
The blue screen always happens with a certain range of HP computers we use. The solution for us has been either the ahci drivers on a floppy disk, or changing the controller back to IDE emulation in the bios if you don't have a floppy drive.
 
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Lucero said:
If the laptop wasn't booting, and you're getting blue screens when installing the media and it reboots, it sounds to me like a hardware issue.
Click to expand...
It would make sense, wouldn't it. I'll give the AHCI drivers a try, it may be something that I've stupidly forgotten to do but I will also run Memtest at some point.

cokecan72 said:
Usually the HDD will be located under a small access panel on the underside of the laptop. 1 or 2 screws and it should pop right off.

As Burnsy said, it shouldn't void the warranty at all
Click to expand...
I did actually have a look at getting the underneath of the laptop off but I almost lost my fingers in the process. Boss said to leave it. From what I remember there's just the one piece of plastic to remove, no access hatches or anything. I couldn't believe it was that difficult to remove the underneath of the laptop.

**Edit** I've checked the manual and there is an access panel but that's just for the RAM. There's no access panel for the hard drive. The whole of the underside of the laptop has to be unscrewed and removed.

Frosty81 said:
The blue screen always happens with a certain range of HP computers we use. The solution for us has been either the ahci drivers on a floppy disk, or changing the controller back to IDE emulation in the bios if you don't have a floppy drive.
Click to expand...
I'll try the AHCI drivers tomorrow. It'll have to be either on a CD or a USB stick, there's no floppy drive. It's a netbook. No optical drive either hence we bought some external USB DVD drives recently as it looks like we'll replace laptops with netbooks so that staff find it harder to install software on them as we'll have the external USB DVD drives. ;)

Burnsy2023 said:
This used to be the case in the late 90's, but not now. I think you're boss is running on outdated information.
Click to expand...
Without being too naughty online, when did you meet my boss?! :D:p

m3csl2004 said:
You could use a linux live disc to access the internal HD and copy any important files from the laptop to a USB drive?
Click to expand...
That's what I want to do. I reckon that a Linux live disc of some kind could let me run Memtest, copy important files over and clean up the mess I made of the hidden partitions etc. I think my colleague used his netbook as his main storage area for work documents. Colleagues are limited to 1GB of network storage because my boss thinks that 1GB is more than enough. I often get people moaning to me about it and I fully accept and understand that really people need 2GB, perhaps even 3GB of space because of the amount of photographs and other files we use. So my colleague runs out of space on the network, uses his netbook as a file store, netbook stops working, I'm unable to get files off........:o
 
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Hirens Boot CD will get your going and do most of the work for you ;)

As for reinstalling just use the install from USB idea (google is your friend) and use Nlite to slipstream the AHCI/Controller drivers to the build of windows and job done!
 
If this is a Dell laptop then there is a chance this is a known issue where it will bluescreen during the install of XP unless you set it into the correct BIOS mode. I'd check that before you continue chasing your tail :)
 
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