Laptop help

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

My compaq laptop crashed as it was implementing the most recent windows 7 service pack. I've tried system restores and repairs which never seem to complete. I can't even seem to get into safe mode though I haven't tried by way of DOS yet. It just BSODs briefly and loops me back to startup.

[Firewind]

Re: Laptop help

Microsoft's software updates have become notorious in the past few years for bricking computers and consoles. Does it BSOD then send you back to BIOS before Windows can start loading (which is probably a Hard Drive problem caused by the update or general wear and tear), or does it actually boot Windows and BSOD when you attempt to log in? (I would Google that because I've never seen that one before).

[Armando]

Re: Laptop help

Don't really know what to suggest that isn't "Do a full wipe and reinstall." If it does come to that though, you should consider making a separate partition for your music, documents, videos, portable apps, steamapps folder, etc (pretty much everything that isn't an installed program.) That way if something like this ever happens again, you can safely wipe your Windows partition without losing anything of value.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Laptop help

I get a BSOD before being kicked back to bios, yeah. I never even get to login.

Gonna talk to my brother-in-law about a win7 boot disc, I guess, all my Steam and iPhone stuff can be restored from my accounts. I'll just be losing some Photoshop programs, which I can probably bum a disc for as well.

Probably for the best. I had a virus in there I could get out from weeks back. Happli or something, but probably unrelated to this as the crash came from an overheat on the processor.

[Armando]

Re: Laptop help

Gonna talk to my brother-in-law about a win7 boot disc, I guess, all my Steam and iPhone stuff can be restored from my accounts.

If you have a lot of games downloaded on Steam, have some place to back them up and want to avoid the download times, you could ask him to make you an Ubuntu live CD or live USB (any other Linux distro should work too.) You can boot off of it and and copy your steamapps folder, which is where all the games themselves are stored.

[Firewind]

Re: Laptop help

Getting a Win7 Boot Disc will be your best bet purely to single out hard drive issues. Problem is is that without actually being able to look at the problem ourselves it's hard to suggest much else.

[Aeni]

Re: Laptop help

How long have you had your laptop for? If it's still under warranty, don't do anything else and have the techs take care of it for you (ask to have them recover your hard drive) If it's off warranty, you can remove the hard drive (2.5") and caddy it into a desktop at a later time to recover that data.