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Laptop rage

Josey Wales

Evil Poptart
Turned my laptop on this morning and it got to the Windows 7 user log in screen and the mouse and keyboard didnt work. My first thought was the keyboard and mouse werent working so another restart might jog them into play.

I restarted and the boot up got to the Windows 7 Logo animation screen and freezed

Tried again and got to Startup Repair at which it froze again

Another restart and now it keeps going to chkdsk, now chkdsk completes and when it does it doesnt do anything else. It says successful and shows no problems but goes no where passed that. Nothing I press or do will push passed the chkdsk and now all restarts bring up the command line chkdsk.

WHAT DO?

Cant seem to find any similar problem, I havent even heard of such madness.

Windows 7
Dell laptop
almost 2 years old
Ive dropped it an absurd amount of times but it was working last night

thoughts?
 

KezraPlanes

Just some dood
Did you power it off correctly? Could be a filesystem error (those seem to happen a lot nowadays)
 

Josey Wales

Evil Poptart
Closed the screen which puts it into a sleep and logs me out. So when I opened the screen it was at the log in screen and dead frozen it seemed
 

KezraPlanes

Just some dood
This isn't the first time I've heard sleep/hibernate/suspention causes issues on a computer w/ Windows 7, specially laptops. And all of them had the same common cause: filesystem errors. Actually a similar case passed through the forums a few weeks ago.

First advice would be to have a thorough check of the HDD, as deep as possible. If it's a filesystem error it could be fixed with that with minimal data damage.
 

Josey Wales

Evil Poptart
Hmm, just started working this time. Although it hung on a black screen with the pointer for a few minutes.

I think this laptop has sailed its course, its time I start to migrate important files and save up for a new one I think.

Thanks for the help anyway Kezra
 

KezraPlanes

Just some dood
Hmm, just started working this time. Although it hung on a black screen with the pointer for a few minutes.

I think this laptop has sailed its course, its time I start to migrate important files and save up for a new one I think.

Thanks for the help anyway Kezra

No problem buddy ;)

Yeah, I think 2 years is enough life for a laptop before retirement. That's how long my last one lasted, and how long I expect my HP to last.
 

Josey Wales

Evil Poptart
Ok actually no my laptop is still fucked. Got to windows explorer and all it is is a black screen, mouse pointer and the start menu icon >.>
 

KezraPlanes

Just some dood
Then try what I mentioned above. If anything it'll help narrow down the problem
 

Josey Wales

Evil Poptart
Ran a 3 hour long pre-boot diagnostic and found the problem. Its my HDD, its failing for whatever reason so im gonna crack this bad boy open and swap HDD's for one I have saved from another laptop. Maybe try to salvage this HDD for a later time since backing anything up from this laptop makes it BSOD
 

KezraPlanes

Just some dood
So I was kinda right :p Glad you can still salvage the laptop and spare some € for now
 

Josey Wales

Evil Poptart
The crazy thing is it runs perfectly normal in Safe Mode - although I suppose it should since it IS Safe Mode... but seems like a failing hard drive would also affect that, idk.
 

LocutusEstBorg

Active Member
I can't fathom how anyone can run a PC without fault tolerant RAID or without regular backups to another disk. Your HDD will crash. Hell I even image my router box every time I make a change like a port forward.
 

slicer4ever

Coding random shit
I can't fathom how anyone can run a PC without fault tolerant RAID or without regular backups to another disk. Your HDD will crash. Hell I even image my router box every time I make a change like a port forward.

not everyone can dish out the money to setup a proper backup system
 

LocutusEstBorg

Active Member
not everyone can dish out the money to setup a proper backup system

You just need one HDD for a backup disk. That's barely $50 for a terabyte which should suffice for several years. The Windows backup tool is good enough and is free. You don't need to go all out with hardware RAID 5/6.
 

slicer4ever

Coding random shit
You just need one HDD for a backup disk. That's barely $50 for a terabyte which should suffice for several years. The Windows backup tool is good enough and is free. You don't need to go all out with hardware RAID 5/6.

I can't fathom how anyone can run a PC without fault tolerant RAID

that was what i was refering to, also, a 1TB HDD for 50$ is probably the lowest end 1TB hdd you can find
 

LocutusEstBorg

Active Member
No the fastest 1TB drives are actually the cheapest. The costlier ones are slower (green/laptop etc.).
Backup is better than RAID unless you have too many operational disks to backup. Not doing so is plain and simple foolish given the investment cost, unless your data is absolutely worthless. Even then it's a very small price to pay just to avoid having to do a clean install, if not for saving data.
 

Josey Wales

Evil Poptart
Its a laptop Torch, I use it for sitting on my couch and looking up porn. Its not like this thing holds all my art work and tax returns for the last 10 years.

Im not gonna freak out about protecting my $400 laptop. Im not even pissed about it, I was just curious what the hell is wrong.
 
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