is my laptop dead completely?

lrw

New Member
hello everyone
please comment.
i have a toshiba laptop, which is 4 years old or around. it has problems with baterry lately but that was ok to handle cause i was going to change laptops.
also more than a year ago cdrom stopped working, so couldnt reinstall windows for ages or any other updates.
so now i was going to transfer all my info to another laptop through a memory stick as i was going not to use it anymore.
i have all the info and important stuff there from years!
sometimes while workig my comp would turn off to a blue screen and start dumping physical memory, i noticed it happened when i used the memory stick i think.
so today while i was saving stuff to the memory stick it did this twice, and got slower every time, then finally it would go to this screen and say some message with STOP and wouldnt load windows, it would go to the part where it says windows xp is loading but never load. then somehow it did make it to the point where i saw my desktop but then it said runtime error and went to the damn blue screen again, started dumping memory and was going really slow. 6% an hour, i couldnt even wait that long because was at work and had to take it home so i asked a guy that is supposed to be good at computers, he turned it off while it was dumping, and then after that it didnt load windows at all, it said something abour problems with memory cant load from windows/system... something 32 ... and asked to put in windows cd.. which i cant do. so i thought it would be ok if i could reinstall windows (maybe by connecting an external cdrom to usb?) but the guy by looking at the screen (want to add he cant read english though) said your hard drive is dead, forget everything you had there!
is it really so? im going to a big city soon and maybe i could show it to some people. do you think its possible to get my files from the hard drive in a situation like that? if you want messages that it shows right now i can turn it on and write them down for you.
anything i can change in bios?
please help!
thanks
 

luckyedboy66

New Member
i dont really know how to fix the problem, but if you want to try to recover the important data, you can buy an external 2.5" IDE hard drive case ($15, meritline.com) and try to transfer the data from the old hard drive to another computer.
 

lrw

New Member
im not sure how its done. i am taking it with me when i go to a big city and there i will find someone to look at it. i just wonder if information from hard disk can really be eraised that easy or is it possible to recover. i dont need the comp to work again, just need my information from hard drive.
 

luckyedboy66

New Member
its not all that easy to erase all the data. if youre going to "a big city" swing by best buy and get a 2.5 inch IDE external HDD case. it'll cost you about $45 bucks at best buy, but if it doesnt work, you can take it back.

basically, all you have to do is take the HDD out of your busted laptop, take off the mounts used to secure it to the computer, and put the HDD in the case. if you plan ahead, you could do it in the best buy parking lot and test it on one of their showcase computers :D.
 
Last edited:

PohTayToez

Active Member
its not all that easy to erase all the data. if youre going to "a big city" swing by best buy and get a 2.5 inch IDE external HDD case. it'll cost you about $45 bucks at best buy, but if it doesnt work, you can take it back.

Or grab one off of newegg for like $10...


Likely, yes, your hard drive is dead, but only in the since that it really shouldn't be used as a boot disk anymore. I would guess that there is a pretty good chance that you could recover your files with an external enclosure, however you might have to take the entire laptop apart to get at the hard drive.
 

Smurf Manser

New Member
this happened to our desktop, we had to reinstall windows, but you can't do that so i am not much help. but what does it do when it boots up?
 
Top