Let's fix it up

Troncoso

Troncoso

VIP Member
Alright. So I have this laptop from this person who wants me to fix it. She said that eventually it froze on her and after that wouldn't boot. She tried using the os disk it came with (a gateway for all that matters) but after she installed windows it would still never load. I've been messing around with it. Using either the os disk or a copy of windows 7 takes forever. Seriously, it stays on the "setup is starting" that i eventually just close out of it. Ubuntu live cd works.
So, I could:

let the setup take 4 years to run. But seriously it takes much longer than it should.
or
try and get the recovery partition working. How can I use the recovery partition?? I tried through the disk's repair option but it doesn't see it??

What are your thoughts? Thanks in advance.
 
different brand uses different key to get into the recovery setup. which brand is your laptop?
just reminder, you may scan the hard drive as well. it may have bad sectors.
 
As I said in my post it is a gateway. I don't have a disk that I can use to scan the harddrive. Is there anything I can use in ubuntu?
 
Need to start by testing the ram and hard drive by running memtest and the hard drive manufacturers drive diagnostic program. What brand of hard drive is it?
 
I don't know what the drive is, but I tried running the memtest on the operating system disk and it wouldn't work. I finally got the recovery partition to work and it reinstalled vista. now that I have that what can i use to test the memory and such?

My problem is, they said they reinstalled vista before.(it takes so long that they leave it on over night). But they said it worked okay for a while but then crashed again. I suppose this would link to the harddrive and memory, but if the hdd has bad sectors, our some of the memory modules are fried...what can i do to fix that?
 
If it takes that long to install vista, I'm guessing its more of a bad hard drive. You use memtest86 to test the ram. Download the file and burn the image to a cd and then boot to the cd and it will automatically run. You need to find what brand the hard drive is so you can download the correct program to test it. I bought 2 western digital caviar black drives and had problems with one of them. It was having the problem yours is, taking a long time to install windows, XP took like over 2 hours when it should have only taken 30 minutes or so.

Here is the link for memtest iso.

http://www.memtest86.com/memtest86-3.5.iso.zip

Unzip it first and then use a burning program to burn the image to a cd.
 
Alright thanks man! Though, the recovery disk took like no time at all. Why would that be? I started it when I posted that I got it working and it's already installing drivers.
 
I would still do the memory and hard drive scans. Not sure why the recovery cd would work ok though.
 
Okay. windows finished loading and the same thing happened. When it all loaded up I tried clicking on something and it locked up. I took out the harddrive and its a

hitachi 160g at 5400rpm. I really think its the harddrive. I did the mem test and it returned no errors. What about the harddrive how should i test it?
 
http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/

click on where it says cd image in blue. It's an ISO image so you'll have to burn the image to a cd, then boot to it. Now, the long or the short test may or may not come back with errors. But I can almost guarantee that its the hard drive. Let me know the results.
 
Well I did an advanced test which told me there were corrupt sectors so I tried fixing it but it gave me error. 0x75 defective drive. Fix failed.

I just did a quick scan and it. Says defective device. Excessive shock.. So I guess there's no fixing it
 
Yeah a new HDD will be required make sure to backup all their files while you still can re-install windows on the new drive and put her files back on as the drive is as good as gone.
 
Luckily there is nothing to back up as there was nothing on it. Thanks for all the help. Testing a hard drive isn't something I've had to do before
 
At least you found out what the issue was without too much trouble. And it makes things a lot easier when there is nothing to back up.

If you plan on diagnosing pc's you will be running drive diagnostics more often.
And its always best to run the program from the right manufacturer, as seagate's tool won't fix any errors on a western digital drive.
 
Normally me fixing a pc is just wiping a harddrive full of viruses and reinstalling the os. It is rarely harware.

And haha. Sounds like you know that from experience
 
Troncoso said:
Normally me fixing a pc is just wiping a harddrive full of viruses and reinstalling the os.
Click to expand...

Malwarebytes does wonders for infected machines instead of reformatting. Over 90 percent of infections can be cleaned up without any ill iffects. And if Malwarebytes can't fully remove it, then combofix or other programs can. You can post the malwarebytes and hijackthis logs security section next time and I'll help you out.
 
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