HELLO First, thanks for looking. I have a problem with my laptop that has 60 pages of coursework due in for college now, and I cant get to it. Here is what is wrong, I hope someone can help! --- Friday, the laptop wont boot. It loads XP Boot options and no matter which is selected, the screen loads for 2 mins then blue screen flashes for less than a sec before rebooting. One big anoying loop. Saturday, reading some help files from Sony it says press F10 during boot to load the recovery software from partition. When booting the error 'INF file txtsetup.sif is corrupt or missing, status 544' appears, saying press any key to reboot. Sunday, on the phone to Sony over in the states and they give me a link, eventually, that downloads a program to resolve this. After 1 1/2 hours on the phone they then say, whoops, that wont work with your model number. So back to square one. I have no recovery disks and the laptop has no floppy drive. When I use an XP Proff NEW disk it loads the install, but 'cannot access hard disk' when in the partition screen. Although this sounds like the disk is dead it picks up it's size 76gb and is picked up in the BIOS. Anyone have any ideas? Couple of other things: - The drive is SATA - I have no recovery disks, but fresh XP disk - I have tried booting straight from a Linux CD with no luck, cos it's a laptop CHEERS for looking, hope someone can help me with this one! BEN EDIT: Sorry I used the word emergency in the title and such but if I cant solve this I fail A Level ICT, hence this really does affect my future and I really want to get this solved. Not sure if I break any T&C's but if anyone can help I will give you a big hug. Cheers all...
Yea, you can buy these adapters 2.5 - 3.5" adapters and plug the hdd into a desktop comp. and pull the files from it. Unless the harddrive is bad, then your pretty much screwed unless your willing to take it to a data recovery place.
Either pull out the hard drive or boot off a linux cd like knoppix. Knoppix loads into ram and will not touch the hard drive, then you can e-mail yourself the files off the hard drive. I'v used that way for recovering files on my computer when it died last time. I plugged in an external hard drive and copied the files from linux.
Oh yea, I forgot, yea knoppix owns, you can get it from here: http://linuxiso.org Just use nero or easy cd creator or something that allows you to burn images and once burned just set your laptop to boot from cd. should help you out. :-D
many unis/coleges have an IT department where they will recover the lost data for u. If u can, try asking them to get the data back for u. although they'll probably just do what Tulatin said and in future, back up all ur data as soon as u can
Cheers for all the help dudes. A few advances: - No Linux want to work on it, Knoppix is renowned for not working with most laptops. - Data recovery is 50-50 if I do it, cos it's £150. - My first thought was get the HD out of there but how? I have no idea what to unscrew and open up on the laptop to get to the HD, no documents came with it. Cheers for all the help! I'll keep you updated, BG
simple. find screws, remove. Remember where they went, or your ****ed. Open laptop slowly and carefully. Remember where all of these little cables go. Look for screws around the HDD, remove them. Eventually it'll come out.
The only problem is from diagrams I can see of the older models first you remove the Speaker panel at the top, then the keyboard to get to the Hard Drive. On this model the speakers screws are under the hinge of the screen, which there is no way of getting at. The rest of the screws are underneath, if you turn the laptop upsidedown. Is'nt that the way to get underneath the motherboard, not the drive? BG
I have called a data repair company and they are sending out a guy right now. I live on Wirral, about 50 mins from Liverpool were a guy is driving from. It costs £150 and takes a day, but there is a no fix - no fee policy (like those claim adverts). I will post what happens cos this looks quite a cool company! BG
1- find a windows 98 box 2- get a usb key 3- format it from the win98 box with the system files 4- boot to the USB key (in you laptop) oh - sorry though i guess that won't work if its formatted NTFS - is i think there is a utility though that will let win98 read NTFS.
