laptop problems.

[Dropkickmurphys]

hey guys, i really need your help with this problem.

i recently bought a new pc and therefore sold my laptop to my brother, but ever since he has had it it has had a major problem.

whenever he tries to do anything in windows it just freezes, so you cant do anything, you then have to power it off manually and it ends up not booting at all which means having to do a reformat.

could this be down to a harddrive failure? or what other problem could it be? thanks.

 

[The_Other_One]

I wouldn't be surprised if it was hard drive related. Perhaps the area where the programs are has become corrupt. Rather than reformatting it, see if you can run CHKDISK. You may need to boot using a CD to access it... But if you can do this, then maybe you could run some repairs and continue using the drive. If anything, it may help in recovery so you can format and reload windows for later.

If you do format, do a low-level format/zero-write. This can typically fix many failing drives.

 

[dznutz]

i could be a defective hd but....

did he drop it? i've heard that some laptops won't boot unless the mouse was properly plugged into the mobo (fell out after a drop)

rather than reinstalling the os just recover the os. you'll probably have a hotkey to recover from a hidden partition. if not then use the recovery console option with your os disk

but before that it would be a good idea to use hiren's boot cd and do some tests/virus scans