Disk Read Error on My Laptop

Possibly dust must have made it into the harddrive and is creating problems with it. The high rotational speed causes disk error if dust particles get in. Try servicing it at an authorised service center.

Quite often when that happens your drive might be defective.

Depending on the value of the contents and how well you have your data backed up determines your next step.

If you have a full backup = buy a new drive.

If the data is worthless, or not very valuable, you can try to format it and reinstall everything.

If the data is valuable, find a data recovery company in your area and send them the drive for an estimate. They have a spectrum of remedies that depend on what you want to spend. The most costly is clean room drive dissassembly and head replacement. They then try to read the data. If the heads have been scored by the bad head they need to install each platter into a special servo reader. Once they have done this with all sides of all heads they will try to read the FAT table and reassemble the data as best they can with a software analysis tool that rebuilds files from fragments in a trial and error way with some smarts.

I have no idea what they will charge. In 1995 I had a 3 gig 2 platter drive that had been immersed in water due to a flood that I sent to data recovery. About $1200 later they gave me back 5 CDs with almost all the data fully recovered. Insurance paid. Now it may well cost that and more, but ask first.

Obviously you should save your data to a CD or DVD every day or week with a backup program. You only need to save new work, all the program files can be reinstalled on a new drive, but your 400 page novel stored in one hard drive...that needs to be backed up.

Thanks a lot, sounds like you learned from past mistakes. I'll call around and shop for an inexpensive drive. My data was saved prior to the crash. Problem is, I have 3 younger siblings that will at times sneak onto my laptop without my permission.

I see I'm going to have to set a lock on it when I get it fixed.

Take care, and thanks again.

well you can always password your laptop so only you know the password and not them.

how can you exactly format the laptop? because i had trouble with it starting yesterday i only knew it because my laptop restarted itself then came up with A DISK READ ERROR OCCURED press CTRL + ALT + DEL to restart and i did that without success

Thank you very much, I'lll give it a shot.

Hard Disk + No Backup = Disaster

Hard disk drives are a mechanical device and will fail, especially so with laptop or notebook computers that are subject to accelerations that a fixed computer is not.

If it is just a bad sector on your disk drive then you may be able to get by with reformatting your hard disk but this will result in the loss of all the data. Be warned however that a disk drive that starts throwing up bad sectors for no apparent reason is liable to fail catastrophically without warning.

If the reformat doesn't work then it's time to replace the disk drive.

Either way you will loose all the data on the disk drive. If you havn't done a backup then you could be in serious trouble. As Aurizon suggested you may be able to recover you data by getting a specialist company to retrieve it but this is not guaranteed.

Hard disk drives are not infallible and can fail for many reasons reason so it is critical that the data on them be backed up. There are numerous ways that this may be achieved but the cheapest and simplest is to do regular backups.

For my laptop I do a full backup of the hard drive every two weeks. It takes about 4 hours but it has saved my bacon at least once so far. I use a small externally mounted hard disk that I plug into the USB port and use the windows backup utility to back up the entire hard drive to the external one. Once the backup is completed the external drive is removed and stored in a fireproof safe.

Laptops are more prone to hard drive failures as well as theft etc. than normal computers and anybody that uses on a regular basis without some sort of disaster recovery plan is asking for trouble. I only hope that you already knew this and have a backup that can be used to recover your data. If not I hope you have learnt a valuable lesson.

Hey thanks, that equation is no joke. My laptop is mainly for personal use, nothing too major stored on it. So, I backup my drive about once a month... Minus the fireproof safe.

Thanks again,

Take care

What a Dell laptop fail?

I have a need for a new anchor for my 12ft tinny.

Sorry. Could not resist.

LOL... I also have a sense of humor... You MAY be getting an anchor soon.

Take care.

Back in 1952, a British lord went to Spain with his Rolls. On one of the dusty roads of Granada, the rear axle of his Rolls broke. He picked the car-phone and called the RR agency in London. Within four hours, a helicopter approached the car with three technicians, who replaced the axle on the spot, and vanished as they came, nothing said.

Two years after this incident, with no charge made for the service, the lord called the agency. - "We don't know what you are referring to, our axles never brake" he was told. Sorry, Couldn't resist.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this is an urban legend.

First off I have heard the same story several times except the location was the Australian outback and South America.

Secondly the first helicopter licensed for civilian service was the Bell 47 and that was in the United States in 1947. I, therefore, doubt that a civilian organization would have had access to one in 1952. Also, the Bell 47 doesn't have the range or lifting capacity to get from England to Spain carrying a repair crew, spare axle, tools and equipment required to replace it.

Finally there is the car phone, while they were possible in 1952, they were as scarce as rocking horse manure and were severely limited in range. They certainly were not capable of global roaming. That would make it fairly difficult for a British car phone in a British Car to work in the Spanish countryside.

It's a nice story, but, when you look at it in detail, it has all the signs of being an urban legend.

Besides, Rolls Royce cars don't break down, the simply cease to proceed

Right, I too think so, but love it dearly. Feel free to embellish the details to make it more believable, on camp fire occasions. Regard, Yuval

Come to think of it, having done the serious enquiries related this story, you're actually in the best positions to create a water-tight version of it... would you please?

I promise to keep pretending it's a real story.

I was just watching an episode of the British motoring show 5^th Gear and they were messing about with an Aston Martin. While doing donuts with this $250,000 car they managed to rip the drive belt for the hydraulic pump off the drive pulleys.

Of course they dived for their mobile phones and called the local Aston Martin dealer and within 15 minutes a helicopter rocked up with the manager and two mechanics dressed in suits and ties. The belt was promptly re-installed and the helicopter departed.

However, before the helicopter was even out of sight they tried doing donuts again with identical results. Back on the mobile phones and the helicopter returned with the manager and mechanics to repair the same problem.

The manager politely suggested that they should desist from ding donuts with the car and drive it at 200 mph as then initially intended.

This all happened on a disused US air base in England the runway of which they planned to use to thrash the living daylights out of the car. They never got the 200 mph out of the car that Aston Martin claim it can do by 180+ mph and 0 to 60 mph in less than 4 seconds isn't bad. I certainly wouldn't complain if somebody gave me one to mess about with.

Now I am not making this up it really was on TV, so it appears that it dose happen, you just need to change the make of cat and get the media involved.

I too watch 5th gear (on BBC Prime), and witnessed their proper abuse of this Australian V8 monster, (Ford was it?) on the beach.

Of course, watching TV and witnessing is hardly the same, but as a new age expression it might just fly. "Witnessed" only they could call it, burning rubber and gaskets on the poor beast.

...not making this up it really was on TV...

Now, having seen some weird stuff on global TV, I wouldn't dare implying that you did.

...you just need to change...

Man, reality really is stranger than fiction, this I got used to.

You have got quite many and good advices. But I suggest to try more simple in the beginning:

Try to reboot when computer is hot: Wait after switching on some half hour and try to reboot. If You succeed, copy immediately most important files. Because this defect most probably will happen again!

If not, try also when computer is cold (switch off supply and wait half an hour).

If only electronics failed in HDD, replacing PCB (temporarily borrowed from another HDD of exactly the same modell) will help You to read data. But with this it is better to go to service, than doing Yourself. Formatting leave to the end, unless You have nothing important on it. But even so , if HDD begins to fail, it is better to replace it than loose again data within next few months.

Good luck!

Thank you very much, I'lll give it a shot.

The easiest and least expensive thing is to remove the drive from your laptop, and hook it up to another computer. I would recommend using the USB port with one of the many USB/IDE interfaces now available. If it is a SATA drive, then you need to one of the USB / SATA converters which are just becoming available.

The bottom line is to hook it to a working computer as an additional drive, and try to read it. Chances are the data can be read, and it is an error in the boot sector or a problem in the windows files that is causing your error, in which case you can copy all your data onto another medium so that you won't lose it.

I have done this many, many times, but inserting the drive into another computer has become more difficult due to the way the hardware and windows recognize changes in the system, but the USB interfaces are terrific and are recognized as temporary storage devices, bypassing the hardware recognition/incorporation sequence.

The first USB external HD I got was a case, so I had to mount the defective drive into it, but last year, I got a kit that is just a power supply for the drive and a connection cable with built in converter. The connection cable is USB on one end, and the other end has two IDE connectors, back to back: one for desktop HD's and a smaller one for the laptop HD's. I love it, and it only cost around $20-25!

Once your data (not the programs, just the files you created or downloaded) is backed up, then you can try different things to repair it either outside your laptop or once reinstalled, or go ahead and reformat it as a last resort.

I do not know if you ever made a set of restore CDs or what came with your laptop originally, but they (the name brands) are getting stingier and stingier in what they give you.

The main point I am making though is to get your data copied off first, if possible. There are a variety of utilities that may be able to repair the damage to the file structure, but be aware that the drive may fail again, and possibly soon, all depending on the nature of the problem and damage. If it is severe, it is definitely time to replace the drive.

Greg

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-1035_11-5029761.html has an article "200 ways to revive a hard drive." Three of their suggestions has worked for my Dell at various times.

1. Freeze it. Put it in an airtight plastic baggy and place it in your freezer for a couple of hours or even overnight. Take it out and try it.

2. Drop it. I dropped one from about eight inches onto a section of newspaper on my desk. It perked up enough to copy the OS files to a CD. (ran about 1/2 hour).

3. Tap it. I know every warning message says to never do this but I had nothing to lose. I used a pair of six inch scissors with a plastic coating on the handle and whacked it twice. Again I got about 30 minutes to save the data.

Good Luck.

One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is the method that I use to recover HDDs in older medical equipment. The process is to dismount the HDD and while still hooked up to cabling, turn the computer on and at the appropriate moment when the HDD is being started for access (after visiting the other storage devices in the bios list) flick the drive around its axis of rotation. This added input torque will often break the stiction of the head just long enough for the drive motor to build up rotation beyond the drag of the read head(s). The drive will come up to speed and be normally accessible. Then, for God's sake, don't turn the thing off! Ghost the thing or back it up and then pitch it.

Dave Meador

I found that I had a USB flash drive in the back of the laptop and that was the problem. Stick out...boot up!

First post on Monday 12^th February 2007
Problem fixed on Friday 12^rd April 2010

Thats 1116 days to figure out that the proble was a dud USB memory stick.

That has to be close to an all time record for slowest computer repair of all time.

Even worse, when you consider that the average usable life expectancy of most computers is around 3 years or (1095 days) this repair took 3 weeks longer to fix.