Security Cable For Laptop Computer

Hard drive failure. What I did

Yesterday I had to change my hard drive and had a few issues that I was able to fix.

The problems started in the morning when my wife called me and told me that the computer would not boot. We have been having trouble with our hard drive for a while now and I was able to fix each time by just reseting the PC. This time though the computer was not seeing the hard drive. Using tools and knowledge that I had I had to do the following:

Install new hard drive

First of all I had to install the new hard drive. I was able to do this by disconnecting my CDR and leaving myDVD drive, two old hard drives in the machine, plus a new 80 gig drive with a 16 meg cache. I was unsuccessful at loading Windows though as I kept getting an error as the Windows setup was starting, after loading the drivers I would get an error that it could not load the setup. I switched to my CDR from the DVD drive and had no problems.

Setup Windows

I successfully did a quick format of the new drive (thanks for that new feature Windows XP) and successfully loaded Windows XP. This is pretty basic as I use a CD that not only has Windows XP on it but also has Service Pack 2 for XP slipstreamed onto it.

Rebuild hard drive partition table

After I booted to Windows I saw that my old drive was not showing up as a drive or a partition. If I right clicked on the partition in Disk Management it knew that the drive existed but could no longer find a partition on it. Windows Disk Management said that the drive was healthy, My first attempt was to create a partition but not to format the partition as I did not want to lose the data for good. I fought with this for a couple of hours as I did not back up lately and the wife would kill me if I lost all of her data. In the end I was able to use Test Disk from the Filesystem tools of the Dos Ultimate Boot Disk. It ends up that the partition table had a start but not an end and the program was able to fix this….whew I would have been in trouble….

Migrate Windows and Office data

After I had the old drive back I went into the BIOS and chose to boot from that drive. I was able to boot to the old Windows XP installation easily enough and did not want to keep any of the data there but thought it would be a good idea to transfer my Windows settings using the file and settings transfer wizard in Windows. I saved the settings using the wizard and chose this as the old computer and in the destination I chose a folder I created on the new hard drive called “transfer files”. I then decided to transfer only my settings as I knew that I was going to have to reload my software and would be manually copying over the file structure from the old drive to the new drive.

I also moved all of my settings for MS Office using the Save my Settings Wizard from the MS Office 2003 tools section. I was able to copy the settings, which come across as an OPS file to the same place as my Windows Transfer Files and Settings.

After I had moved the settings and files over I rebooted and went back into the BIOS and changed my first boot to the new hard drive and it’s windows XP installation. I was very happy to see that after running the wizrds for transfering the settings and after reloading MS Office 2003 I was able to move over my mail folder and saw all of my email, contacts, and best of all my email addresses (Still had to fill in the passwords for email but that’s OK). After a relogon I also had all of my desktop settings back includig the background picture of my daughter and the animated Pingu cursors.

Copy data from bad drive

Next I just did a blanket move of all of the files from the old hard drive to new into a new folder that I created in the root of the drive. I did this simply to save time as I am not sure about the stability of the old hard drive and fear that I will lose it again.

Reload software

I have started reloading software but as usual I am going to be slow about the move this time. I will install some of my favorite freewares and will install Streets and Trips, Adobe Acrobat, Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe Photoshop Elements and that’s it.

I have roughly followed about half of my Reloading Windows tutorial but since I have both drives functioning at the moment I have tried to cut some corners and make this work well as well as getting my wife up and running quickly for her work stuff this morning.

Security Cable For Laptop Computer stuff to buy

Pal Pc Tracker - Stops Computer Theft!
Computer software that allows you to find your Pc anywhere in the world if it's ever lost or stolen!

How To Make Money Working From Home!
A practical, Step-By-Step guide to start making money on the Internet using your computer!

Cleaning Computers - Secrets Exposed!
How To Start Your Own Profitable Computer Cleaning Business - Step By Step Business Kit!

Security Cable For Laptop Computer Recent Stories from around the internet

security cable for laptop computer

It's time to think about leaving your laptop at home. For years, mobile workers have been ditching their desktop computers for laptops that they can take wherever they go. Now road warriors are starting to realize that they can get even more ...

Time to Leave the Laptop Behind - Wall Street Journal

PC gaming giant Alienware announced a new addition to the company's gaming laptop lineup on Monday, taking a somewhat sharp turn from the recent M17x model . The new M17 (minus the "x") system trades Nvidia graphics for ATI (including a multi-GPU ...

Dan Ackerman - CNET News

Last weekend I had a chance to speak at the annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers in Palo Alto, Calif., on the subject of laptops. And what many of the attendees wanted to know was whether a low-cost Netbook would be a ...

Michelle Thatcher - CNET News

Every one of you out there has a stupid friend. You know who I mean. It's the person who insists on touching your computer's monitor when pointing (because, obviously, five millimeters is too far away to indicate a point on the screen). They're the ...

Always-On Notebook Cases Are both X-Ray Friendly and Idiot Approved - Wired

Read Rob's latest tech tips in his blog, Faster Forward . Rob Pegoraro: The scheduling gods have me against Ana Marie Cox and Tucker Carlson *and* Celebritology--I feel like I'm getting set up here! OTOH, do any of those three have a shiny new ...

A transcript follows. - Washington Post

Tags: Research In Motion Ltd. , Apple Inc. , RIM BlackBerry , Storm , Sales Strategy , Sales Force Management , Handhelds , Sales , Hardware , Larry Dignan Apple CEO Steve Jobs made it quite clear what company he wants to upend: Research in Motion ...

Category: Verizon - ZDNet Blogs

Category: AT&T - ZDNet Blogs

The paranoid have lots of reasons to fear the current information age. Iffy wireless security protocols leave many wireless networking devices prone to snooping, while keyloggers have been used by malware writers to compromise security of wired ...

Beware: your keyboard may be tattling on your typing - Ars Technica

There's a new buzzword out there: cloud computing. The term itself isn't new - I don't remember the first time I heard it, but the term has been regularly thrown around for at least a year - but thanks to Microsoft's announcement about its Azure ...

Cloud computing is the new buzzword - Gulf News

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome chief software architect, Microsoft Corporation, Ray Ozzie. (Cheers, applause.) RAY OZZIE: Thank you. Thank you. Good morning! Welcome to PDC. Great to be here today. It's going to be an exciting week ...