Reply to: hard drive woes

[suityou01]

I've seen numerous reports of Windows 10 updates recently stuffing up systems. The quality is down, and worryingly there are unanswered questions on the Ms Forums spanning several months.

Firstly, from a distance is does sound like the hard disk is starting to fail. You would expect a few BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) as the beginning of the pains.

In reality this is a good lesson in backing up. You should have everything important to you stored off the machine in cloud storage such as Dropbox, Google Drive or whatever.

Before you do anything, get your house in order with regards to this. Then you are not chained to one machine. It could fail, and you could have a new one mailed to you at the rig and not worry. The kind of freedom this kind of discipline brings cannot be overstated.

I wish you all the best.

Suity

Sent from my CLT-L09 using Contractor UK Forum mobile app

[sludgesurfer]

Thankyou all for your kind suggestions. The festive spirit is alive and well on Cuk.

Hopefully the new laptop plugged into the old drive should do the trick. Unfortunately, in addition to a broken laptop, I now have a broken helicopter so can't get off to find out. If anyone happens to be passing the Shetlands, can you stop by the hangar in Sumburgh and provide some technical support to the guys trying to fix it? Much obliged.

[Snarf]

Afternoon - Maybe post a rough location, someone close enough might be able to help? Certainly if your close Ill happily have a look

Looking at the model of your laptop it has a normal SATA hard drive, and as you have windows 10 its unlikley to be encrypted.

I'd whip the hard drive out and plug it into another PC with one of these :

https://www.ebay.co.uk/i/28368918782...8aAvKxEALw_wcB

Probably your best bet.

Though if the drive has properly failed then you might just have to accept the loss

[Hobosapien]

Try booting from a Windows 10 install or recovery disc* and see if it gives you the repair option, which should sort out any issues caused by Windows update.

*If need to download it then the Microsoft Media Creation Tool will give you the option of creating a disc or USB boot drive.

[DealorNoDeal]

Windows update

That's another reason why I've disabled the fecker:

https://www.contractoruk.com/forums/...dows-10-a.html

[wattaj]

From what I've read it's just possible that it's not the hard drive itself, and it could be windows update that's messed things up. Unfortunately, unless you've got an alternative boot device, you can't run chkdsk /r as described here:

HP Laptop Hard Drive Short DST Failed [Quick Fix]

Fingers crossed, you will be able to access the drive from the new laptop. Good luck.

I had a similar problem here when a Windows update failed to complete and then was unable to roll itself back. It kept trying to reboot, but never made it past the Windows logo before rebooting again. I had to use a Linux boot disk/USB to get me into the machine in order to recover/back-up the personal files and then reinstall Windows from a recovery USB stick that I'd built from another machine. Total PITA, but it has worked and the "broken" laptop is now working again.

Good luck... I guess that we know what you'll be doing with your two weeks at home.

[DealorNoDeal]

It asked me to do some sort of windows update and restart. I said OK & left it running overnight. The next day the screen was lit but nothing was showing. Being in somewhat of a rush I buttoned it and its never managed to boot since.

From what I've read it's just possible that it's not the hard drive itself, and it could be windows update that's messed things up. Unfortunately, unless you've got an alternative boot device, you can't run chkdsk /r as described here:

HP Laptop Hard Drive Short DST Failed [Quick Fix]

Fingers crossed, you will be able to access the drive from the new laptop. Good luck.

[sludgesurfer]

Can you think of anything adverse that happened to the laptop prior to it failing eg. exposure to cold, damp, sea air? Was it a while since you'd previously rebooted it?

If you can't manage to recover the data using the new laptop, you could try

It asked me to do some sort of windows update and restart. I said OK & left it running overnight. The next day the screen was lit but nothing was showing. Being in somewhat of a rush I buttoned it and its never managed to boot since.

[DealorNoDeal]

No dice. Worth a shot though. I've bought a new laptop and SATA to USB cable to try and recover data from the old drive.

Can you think of anything adverse that happened to the laptop prior to it failing eg. exposure to cold, damp, sea air? Was it a while since you'd previously rebooted it?

If you can't manage to recover the data using the new laptop, you could try

[sludgesurfer]

No dice. Worth a shot though. I've bought a new laptop and SATA to USB cable to try and recover data from the old drive.

[DealorNoDeal]

This is a long shot but try taking the battery out, and putting it back in, and see if this makes any difference. I've had laptop faults where this has done the trick.

Also, try it on the mains just in case the battery is low.

[sludgesurfer]

Thanks - No joy with the reset described in the link. It seems to start an "automatic repair" then after about 5 minutes won't boot with a black screen

Appreciate the help. I'll try the SATA to USB route on another machine and then mess around with ISOs

[Lance]

Solved: HP laptop Start-Up Test - Hard Disk Short DST Failed - HP Support Community - 5956724

Try the steps suggested there before messing around with bootable ISOs. If you’re lucky the drive software has crashed and a reboot of the drive will recover it.


If the hard drive is physically failed then you need to send it off to a specialist recovery company. It’ll cost £500+ depending on how much data. Experience tells me that individuals never pay this and on that basis I refuse to attempt it for them. Is the data isn’t worth £500 then I don’t see why I should recover it for them. If encrypted they’re going to need the keys so you’ll need to send them the entire laptop and the password used.

If the controller is fried then it *might* be possible to buy an identical drive and swap the controller. The encryption key is stored on the TPM chip so this method will deal with that.

[sludgesurfer]

Thanks.

When I try to download the file from the hyperlink 4.11.RC2, there are 6 files. Three are .iso and three are .txt

Do I need to put all of these on my Formatted USB stick?

I'm assuming I then change the boot order in the BIOS setup, install the USB and restart the machine?

[WTFH]

I've had to google some of those words....that's the level of intellect your dealing with here....please get the sock puppets out.

I was running windows 10 and I could get into the boot sequence screen where I am able to specify booting from a removable drive. I have not tried that yet as I'm on an oil platform with a tulipty internet connection and the windows 10 ISO is a 10Gb download so I may have to wait till I'm back on the beach for that one.....and to try and catch a feathery linux.

OK, don't bother trying a Windows ISO. Get a portable Linux - such as Damn Small Linux - it runs to a whole 50MB. Damn Small Linux, Download the ISO
But yes, maybe wait until you're on dry land.