My pc is going bad. Started by not accessing the web, then degaded to the point it won’t boot up. Called Dell tech support, talked with calcutta for over an hour, they made a wonderful promise that did not materialize and I don’t have a case number to back it up. What’s worse, there is no record of my call. I think they erased the record. Anyway, called again last night, talking with the initial screener, a white guy named Kelly, and he hung up on me after 5 minutes. Called again today, got more help, but I have a lot of homework to do.
So I’m at the point where I want to throw it down the stairs and get a new one. Problem is that I want to save all the data off the hard drive. How do you do that when the computer won’t boot? Oh yeah, can’t find the original discs. If I get a new computer, can I somehow pull the old hard drive and connect it to the new computer and do a file swap?
“Put your creed in your deed.” Emerson
“When asked if you can do something, tell’em “Why certainly I can”, then get busy and find a way to do it.” T. Roosevelt
Replies
Find someone who can mount your hard disk on their machine (not hard to do). Them have them copy the stuff you want to save to a CD or jump drive.
It is possible that you have a complete hard disk failure that would prevent the data from being recovered easily. Some hard disk problems can easily be recovered as described above.
In the future, you can easily back things up to a jump drive or by e-mailing it to your yahoo or other externally hosted account.
Regards,
Roger <><
OK, the first thing you need to do is STOP TURNING THE COMPUTER ON! If you have a hard drive dying, you might be slowly grinding the usable data off it just by trying to access it.
If the drive is OK and the problem lies soemwhere else, then you will be OK. Take the cover off the computer and look for the hard drive. It is the size of a paperback novel and likely tucked into a cage near the front of the computer.
The hard drive (or HD - not Home Depot in this case!) will have two sets of wires attached to it. One should be the power connector, it has four wires that look about 16ga. The other is the data cable. If it is a wide (like 2") and thin cable, then it is IDE. If it is only 1/2" wide, then it is SATA. If the cable is round, it could be either - look at where it connects to the hard drive... if it is 2" wide there then it is IDE.
While you are there, you can pull the wire connectors of and unscrew the drive from the case.
Now that you know you have either an IDE or an SATA drive, you can buy the appropriate external encloser to put it in. These can be picked up for about $20 - $30, and will plug right into your new PC, whatever that might be.
Rebuilding my home in Cypress, CA
Also a CRX fanatic!
Parenting has always been a mix of sage life advice and inexcusable laziness.
Ditto what Paul says. It ain't that hard to do. Frustrating that to fix a computer you have to have another computer.
Whoa...Who said it was the hard drive? From the symptoms you describe, it sounds like a classic dell mainboard failure. What OS were you running? Do you know anybody who might have boot files on CD or diskette? Does the power supply come on? If you do end up moving the HD, you'll hafta run the setup utility, so your new 'puter knows what to do with it
Jess it is/was XP with service pack 1. Power supply comes on, tries to boot. The last tech person showerd me where to go on the Dell site to get downloaded files, and since you have to enter the service tag for the pc it pretty much shows the correct ones.
It is a Dimension 4550, about 4 yrs old.
One of my thoughts is that I can get a basic pc for not a lot of money, 'specially if I keep the nice monitor and don't have to re-buy excel and word and such which were upgrades.
"Put your creed in your deed." Emerson
"When asked if you can do something, tell'em "Why certainly I can", then get busy and find a way to do it." T. Roosevelt
Edited 6/21/2007 2:24 pm ET by FastEddie
Edited 6/21/2007 2:25 pm ET by FastEddie
Have you gat a geeky friend? Take your HD to him and ask if the it will boot in one of her boxes.If so, get a new box and stick your HD in it as Master. Unfortunately, unless you have office and Excel on CDs, you will have to buy them again, unless the above works.If you downloaded them, your friend may be able to copy the installs from you old HD.SamT
Praise the Corporation, for the Corporations' highest concern is the well being of the public.
What model of computer is it? It doesn't happen to be a Optiplex GX270? If it is, it is most likely bulging capacitors.
http://www.tnpcnewsletter.com/dan/Bulging_Capacitors/
We had many of these computers at work that had to have the motherboard replaced (free of charge from dell)
Yeah, unless your data is encrypted, or a failure in the box has jumbled the drive, it's a fairly simple matter to install the drive in a different box and copy off the raw data. You can't generally preserve your windows config, but with effort you can recover even such stuff as browser bookmarks.
You might try a local computer shop -- probably an independent one is best, vs the Geeks at Best Buy, et al -- and see if they can repair the box. Be sure to tell them that you absolutely DO NOT want the system reformatted/reloaded unless and until the data is saved.
Likely your box is just badly virus-infested, or has a scrambled registry, and they can recover after some cleanup. But expect to pay $100-300 or maybe more. For maybe a little less they'll pull the data off the box and put it on a new box you purchase.
And, after you get things fixed up, set yourself up a decent backup scheme.
But expect to pay $100-300 or maybe more.
For an "entry level" computer - which is more than adequate for anything but serious gaming - you will pay $200 to $500, typically. Circuit City has a pretty decent eMachines box for $200 at the moment.
He might be better off replacing it than trying to nurse a 4 year old box, especially if he has to pay someone to work on it.
OK you've got a number of options. This is what I do for work now so for once I really do know what I'm talking about. The advice on getting a hard drive enclosure from your local computer store is probably the best. Taking out the HD is usually a piece of cake. POP it in the enclosure and hook up the USB cable to the new PC when and if you get one. Provided the HD is still good you'll be able to see all your data on it. You then just copy and paste
Now if you want to keep the old PC you pop the HD take the data off and put it on somebody else's computer temporarily. This is preferred so you'll know if the HD is still any good. You then put the HD back in the old computer and reinstall the OS. (You'll have to have either the original set up disks or a copy of Windows (preferably XP). When you reinstall the OS reformat the HD. If the machine was infected in some way you want to get rid of the virus. Also it will make the machine run much faster than it was prior to crashing. The biggest issue after the reinstall is drivers, XP may or may not find all the necessary drivers when you reinstall it.
If things don't seem to be working, right click on my computer go to properties/ the hardware tab and device manager. Anything with a yellow exclamation point doesn't have the right driver. Again on another machine you go to the Dell web site. Put in you service tag, find the machine and download the network driver (you should be able to find something with the original configuration). You'll probably need a memory stick to transfer the drivers from the machine you're working on to the one you're reformatting but those are cheap these days. Move the file over and install the network driver. Once that is working go back to the Dell site on the machine you're redoing and download and install any of the other drivers you need.
You'll need to reinstall any office apps so hopefully you have their original set up disks. Good luck, it's really easier than it sounds.
Jeffie, thanks, but let me try a few more emails. See the following ...
Ribs, I bought a Rockfish enclosure (nicely made IMHO) and connected it to the laptop. I can go to the device manager in the control panel and it recognizes the correct brand and model and that it is a usb connection. One time the pc acknowledged a new device was connected, and one time i could scan the list of files through explorer. But, when I go into Word and try to open a file, there is no path for the E: drive, and I can't see it through explorer either."Put your creed in your deed." Emerson
"When asked if you can do something, tell'em "Why certainly I can", then get busy and find a way to do it." T. Roosevelt
Reboot the computer, with the external HD plugged into the usb port, and powered up. That should solve any problems with the system not seeing the HD. Unless the problem is a hardware problem.Once you can see the files in windows explorer, copy everything quickly to another HD, while you have the chance...
A friend is a person that knows everything about you and still likes you.
No go, Jeff. It would not reboot, hung up on a blank screen. Pulled the cable, rebooted, got a safe-mode screen. I wonder if the E: drive was trying to be the boot drive?"Put your creed in your deed." Emerson
"When asked if you can do something, tell'em "Why certainly I can", then get busy and find a way to do it." T. Roosevelt
That's possible.Depends on whether your computer is capable of, and set for booting from a usb drive, or not.Do you know how to get into cmos setup ?
A friend is a person that knows everything about you and still likes you.
No. How?"Put your creed in your deed." Emerson
"When asked if you can do something, tell'em "Why certainly I can", then get busy and find a way to do it." T. Roosevelt
There's usually a particular key to press at a particular time during the bootup process.Different ones for different computers.I have no idea what yours is.Try putting a different bootable hard drive in the enclosure and booting up again with it plugged in and powered on.If it happens again, that's probably the problem.I don't think it is likely that is the problem, though. More likely there is just a hardware problem with the hard drive you already have in the enclosure.
A friend is a person that knows everything about you and still likes you.
Got tired of screwing around with something that I don't understand, so I took it to a local Geek Squad office. They connected the HD to their pc and could not get a response. The tech said he could hear it clicking, which he said is a strong indicator of a dead drive. So I paid $59 to have it sent off for further analysis to see if the data could be saved. 5-7 days."Put your creed in your deed." Emerson
"When asked if you can do something, tell'em "Why certainly I can", then get busy and find a way to do it." T. Roosevelt
Ouch.That is what I feared, though. After you couldn't get it at it in that external enclosure.I had one that did that. Every time I tried it, no-go. Nada. Zip. Couldn't even address it. System said it wasn't there.I was loathe to dispose of it because it had a bunch of irreplaceable data on it. And I couldn't afford the hundreds to thousands of dollars it would take to have someone retreive the info for me.Finally, after about 20 months... I tried one more time, putting it in as a secondary drive... And it WORKED !!!But it was making noise, and I knew it could go again at any time. So I copied every bit of it over to the other drive as quickly as I could. The noise got worse and worse, and finally it locked up the system. Right after I had copied everything over. I was just going back to check and be certain I'd gotten everything.After I rebooted, it was gone again.I tore it apart to get the magnets and platters out of it. LOL
Yeh... That'll work.
Ed,
Give me a call.
We'll arrange a time when I can walk through whatever you need to do, with you, on the phone.
For about $30, you can buy an adapter/cable that will let you plug ANY hard drive into another machine's usb port, then you can read and copy to your heart's content.
Mine is called a "R-driver 3, usb 2.0 to sata ide cable", and includes the power adapter to allow you to power up a desktop hard drive.
it allowed me to take all those old computers in the basement, rip the hard drives out, and heave the rest in the trash. Wife is happy.
Edited 6/22/2007 5:16 pm ET by HammerHarry
That's what this Rockfish housing is. Looks like an oversize HD, you put the HD inside it and connect the HD to the internal cables, then on the ouside of the housing there are power switches anda usb to the working pc. Pretty slick."Put your creed in your deed." Emerson
"When asked if you can do something, tell'em "Why certainly I can", then get busy and find a way to do it." T. Roosevelt