Xerol Oplan
01-07-2007, 05:00 AM
I'll start this out by saying Dell sucks. My laptop has always had heat problems (due to there being no kind of internal ventilation system whatsoever, save for a small fan blowing directly over the CPU), and yesterday my harddrive crashed. (I'm posting this from a friend's computer at MAGFest, but I have no machine to get online with from home right now, so it might take me some time to read any replies.)
After running all kinds of tests and doing some live CD magic I determined that the MBR on the boot partition (which also has about 70 gigs of files, including all my music source files, all my code, and a ton of other crap that I absolutely can't lose since I haven't done a backup in months) is fried. I can't mount it in two different linux distributions, but I can mount the other two partitions (the Diagnostic partition, which I managed to boot to several times, ran all the diagnostics, and found NOTHING WRONG) and the recovery partition, which (when hitting Ctrl-F11 to boot to) gives me the option of either completely wiping the drive and restoring XP, or rebooting.
Now here's the problem, Dell didn't ship my laptop with an XP CD. There's a utility you can access when booting from the CD that will allow you to examine and possibly repair the MBR, but I have no way to do that since the "CD" is just this recovery partition.
However, I do have a 128MB USB key, and I did manage to get one of the two live CDs to recognise it. So, if I can find some tool that will work in linux to repair or at least examine the MBR, and is under 128 megs, I might have a chance at saving at least some of the data. I'm planning on getting a new laptop soon anyway, but I definitely need to be able to get back to this old data somehow. Keep in mind that I haven't really used linux much at all so I'm not sure what I'm looking for or what to do, but at least I can still USE the computer, and the thumbdrive gives me a means of storage so I can move things to it for now.
I did try putting the harddrive in my USB enclosure, which resulted in windows giving a "power surge error" when it finally recognised it as a harddrive (which in itself took several minutes).
Also, since after tonight I probably won't be able to get online for 2 weeks, if you can help in any way please call me, my number is (410)905-0165. I don't pick up numbers I don't know, so leave a voice message the first time, then I'll call you back.
After running all kinds of tests and doing some live CD magic I determined that the MBR on the boot partition (which also has about 70 gigs of files, including all my music source files, all my code, and a ton of other crap that I absolutely can't lose since I haven't done a backup in months) is fried. I can't mount it in two different linux distributions, but I can mount the other two partitions (the Diagnostic partition, which I managed to boot to several times, ran all the diagnostics, and found NOTHING WRONG) and the recovery partition, which (when hitting Ctrl-F11 to boot to) gives me the option of either completely wiping the drive and restoring XP, or rebooting.
Now here's the problem, Dell didn't ship my laptop with an XP CD. There's a utility you can access when booting from the CD that will allow you to examine and possibly repair the MBR, but I have no way to do that since the "CD" is just this recovery partition.
However, I do have a 128MB USB key, and I did manage to get one of the two live CDs to recognise it. So, if I can find some tool that will work in linux to repair or at least examine the MBR, and is under 128 megs, I might have a chance at saving at least some of the data. I'm planning on getting a new laptop soon anyway, but I definitely need to be able to get back to this old data somehow. Keep in mind that I haven't really used linux much at all so I'm not sure what I'm looking for or what to do, but at least I can still USE the computer, and the thumbdrive gives me a means of storage so I can move things to it for now.
I did try putting the harddrive in my USB enclosure, which resulted in windows giving a "power surge error" when it finally recognised it as a harddrive (which in itself took several minutes).
Also, since after tonight I probably won't be able to get online for 2 weeks, if you can help in any way please call me, my number is (410)905-0165. I don't pick up numbers I don't know, so leave a voice message the first time, then I'll call you back.