how to fix hdd?

C

chuckie

New Member
i have a hp mini 110. i had GTA vice city and gma booster running. and the netbook was getting only ac power. ( i broke the battery have a bigger one and 2gb ram coming in the mail) but there was a storm going and the power went out. so the computer instantly lost power while it was loading a mission of the game. this morning i go to boot it and get to the screen where you choose to start windows normally or in repair mode. i tried start normally the first time. it got to a screen where that was all black with three green lines moving through a box then after a minuite or two it went back to the bios/startup screen so i went into the bios and tested the ram and hard drive. the ram was fine but the hardrive almost instantly went to: test status 7 with something like all elements read.

then i tried to start it in repair mode and it said to put in the boot disk or something like that and i dont have one and i dont have a disk drive. please help this is my only computer.

( im using this hp program that has internet/mail/im/music that starts before windows right now)
 
I googled the result and it states that the "Read Test Failed" so it looks like you will need a new hard drive and need to reinstall Windows. If it's under warranty then HP will take care of you. Otherwise you'll need to buy a new laptop (SATA) hard drive and reinstall Windows from scratch.
 
You're kind of limited as to what you can do since you don't have an OS disk to try a repair. Here's a link to the procedure to do a restore from the restore partition on the HP mini: HP mini Restore. Unfortunately, this will overwrite any data you have on the disk. If you have data you need to save first, you could remove the disk drive and install or attach it to another computer to save the data before doing the restore.
 
Before you do anything that drastic, take the hard drive out of the mini and attach it to another system and use the drive manufacturers hard drive disk diagnostic utility to scan the drive and see if it can repair the errors on the drive. Most of the time it can, especially if its just from a power outage. What brand of hard drive is it?
 
i really appreciate the help. unfortunately there arent any other computers i can plug the hdd into. ive tried two times to do a restore. the computer doesnt even respond to f11 in bios. is there some way i can clean the hdd and make a linux boot thumb drive? im not really worried about losing information. and ive been thinking about going to linux for a while. but ive never put an o.s on a computer before. how can i find drivers for my computer? will windows and linux drivers be different? once again i really appreciate any help i can get.
 
If the HDD has physical problems where a particular place on the drive is not able to be read or written to then the mfr diagnostics may be able to recover the data in that place, relocate it to another place on the disk and mark the original space on the disk as bad so it won't be reused. Since your problem seems to have happened while some files were being written there's a good chance a needed file is corrupted and the mfr diagnostics won't be able to help you.

Virtually any type of troubleshooting that can be done will require another working machine. You could create a bootable USB thumb drive or CD with files on it that might help you but without access to another computer that would be difficult to do.
 
alright i went out and bought a new 8gb thumb drive so i could make a bootable usb ubuntu copy. but with the hp instant web im stuck with i cant run a program to make the ubuntu bootable. i would really appreciate it if someone could give me a link or email a copy of an already usb bootable ubuntu i can download straight to my thumb drive and install
 
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