M1530 Failed Hard Drive

Vista does not boot up on my Dell m1530 laptop. It stays at the black screen with the green loading bar (recently it started to go past that screen to an all black screen but nothing further). A dell technician is coming to replace my hard drive, but I want to recover any files I can...

The following is what I have attempted AND FAILED:

1) Original Vista CD
2) VistaLive Boot CD (After a long time, there was a black background and I could see and move the mouse pointer on the screen. But there was nothing I could do.)


Currently I am downloading Linux Knoppix Boot CD, maybe I can get that to work.

All I want to do is see my files, and copy them to an external drive/Flash Drive. The hard drive will be replaced anyways, but I have a lot of stuff.


Please help!!

 

Has the drive failed completely, or is it just getting hung because of corrupted boot files? Since you're getting a partial start on the boot process it sounds like you may have corrupted boot files (which could be caused by bad sectors on the hdd).

Since you're already scheduled to have it replaced, pull the drive, put it in an external USB enclosure, and hook it up to another computer. That way, it should be treated as just another passive storage medium, and if the drive is still functional, you should be able to pull files from it (other than, perhaps, in the area where the bad sectors or other problems are ocurring).

If you do manage to access the drive in this manner, once you've copied what you want, make sure you use something like Active@KillDisk to wipe the drive before you hand it over to the technician - no sense trusting that s/he's going to properly wipe the drive for you and not just chuck it in a bin where someone else can grab it and pull your private info off the drive.

 

I think the drive is just getting hung like you say because it won't go past the boot screen. There is an option to "Repair my Computer" when you press F12. What happens with that is there is a blinking underscore on the top left of the screen for ~5-10 seconds, and then it goes back to the boot screen with the loading bar.

My friend told me about the external drive option, and hopefully that works. I just want to recover the stuff. But thank you very much.

I hope I can pull some stuff of there, like my documents, etc.

 

Does anyone have experience with Knoppix or Slax? I see all my files, like program files, and actually copied over 1 file i needed from program files onto my usb drive. But, the important files I need are in My documents in my username...

I can't find My Documents or My User Folder (Vista) anywhere...

 

They should be in USERS/{profile name} as opposed to DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS

 

Can't find it. I found a folder with my username at the path you mentioned, but there is NOTHING inside. there should be my documents, my music, my pictures, etc. but it is entirely blank.

 

It's possible that those files are located somewhere else, and that the folders called "My ...." are just junction points that point to where the actual files are kept.

Try looking in the following filepaths:
%systemdrive%\Users\{user_name}\Documents
%systemdrive%\Users\{user_name}\Music
%systemdrive%\Users\{user_name}\Pictures
%systemdrive%\Users\{user_name}\Videos

Assuming your system drive was "c:\" that would mean the following:
c:\Users\{user_name}\Documents
c:\Users\{user_name}\Music
c:\Users\{user_name}\Pictures
c:\Users\{user_name}\Videos

If you still can't find them, try doing a search for a file that you know should be in one of those folders.

 

Hey Shyster

Thats the same folder I found but there is nothing in it. However, I am looking at it on my own laptop through Knoppix Linux Live CD, so it is different. Tomorrow I am going to try hooking up the drive to my friend's external enclosure. What do u think are the chances of me getting my documents, music, etc.?

 

If the drive was indeed failing, you would see blue-screens of death rather than just a halted boot up. As others have said, it's just a corrupted file or 10 that is preventing the bootup.

Are you able to get into Safe Mode at least? (Press F8 repeatedly before Widnows begins to load up).

 

Very, very good.

 

Hope so. Will try later today when the technician comes and removes the hard drive and installs the replacement.

Dbam, I cannot boot anything windows-related at all. Even "repair my computer", the vista install cd, or the vista live cd downloaded from online dont work. In dell diagnostics (which does run, achieved by pressing F12 at bootup), it shows that memory, harddrive, gpu, etc. are all fine. However, the next part where you can diagnose specific parts, I click Hard drive and there are many points in the test where the diagnostic says the certain area on the hard drive is unreadable.

On Knoppix and Slax live cd, I can boot linux. I can see all my program files but I dont have anything there that I can copy. When I find my user folder in /Users/, for some reason, it takes an absurdly long long time to open. And when it does, there is nothing inside.

I just hope that the error on the hard drive didnt affect my user/my documents folder -- hopefully that's not the reason why it hangs up. Hopefully, by plugging the hard drive into an external enclosure, it will show up as USB and I can easily take whatever I need.

 

Oh wow, that certainly makes the hard-drive suspect. Hopefully the external HD idea works out then to get all your files out.

 

Ok. I attached the hard drive to an external enclosure and it did not work. I was unable to open the main partition where all my files are.


Any last minute suggestions? If not, then how do I run a program to delete EVERYTHING on there? this sucks

 

You say it could not open the main partition....could it open any partition?

Does the drive show in MY COMPUTER? Does it show in DISK MANAGER?

 

It does not show in either. It recognized the recovery partition (~10gb).


I have no choice now. Im going to run a program on it to erase all data.

 

You could take one of those heavy duty magnets and rub it all around the drive itself.

 

If you can see it --the physical disk--in disk manger, try using testdisk to recover the partition.