Is my laptop dead?!

A

aestorr

New member
Hi experts, give me your advice! I think my laptop may have died. It is (or was) a Samsung VM8000, nothing special, but I liked it. The other day I heard sth clicking from it, sounded like the CD-ROM drive so I opened it. The noise stopped but the computer froze. Froze for ages, wouldn't do anything so I had to take the battery out and restart it. When it rebooted it asked for the boot disc to be inserted, which I don't have. I managed to get into the bios and set the primary disc or sth the the CD-ROM so I could put the Win2k CD and try to reinstall WIndows, but it wouldn't acknowledge the existance of the hdd.
Is this the end of the line? I'm assuming the hdd has packed up here. When I looked underneath it I saw that the vent for the cooling fan was a bit clogged up, only about 30% of it free from dust, so could it have been an overheating problem? Assuming it's foxable and anyone has a diagnosis how much is it gonna cost me to get it fixed?
Thanks in advance!
 
S

scarecrow

1
Maybe just a broken harddisk- not a dead laptop. Clean whatever you are able to clean, usea windows9X floppy and try to access your harddisk (via fdisk or whatever). If you don't see any harddisk attached, then you have to replace the drive.
 
C

catachresis

1
This happened to me a few weeks ago with the laptop: it was heat-related, I believe, and righted itself after cooling a few hours. Follow Scarecrow's instructions. You can't go any further until you detect the hard drive, but it may not be irreparable.
 
dx

dx

1
aestorr said:
Assuming it's foxable and anyone has a diagnosis how much is it gonna cost me to get it fixed?
Click to expand...
Many drive manufacturers have a drive testing utility that can help you diagnose Hard Drive problems. Do you know who the manufacturer of the Hard Drive is?

If you are lucky it was just thermal (ie, drive got too hot and shut down). But if the BIOS does not see it, it is probably toast. Replacing it is going to run you $75-300 depending on the drive size you want to replace it with (and where you live ;) ). It is a little tricky to replace a Laptop drive, but it can be done if you have the right tools and skills. I have done several laptop HD swapouts and its not too difficult. If you want to do it yourself, an assembly manual would help... try searching Google. ;)
 
M

Mr Snatcher

New member
Clicking noise is usaully the hard drive. Running scan disk my help to see if the disk is bad. Its a cheap way but should let you know if it nackered.
 
S

scarecrow

1
aestorr said:
How do I get into scandisk then when I can't even get Windows working!?
Click to expand...
You can do lots of things without windows working... even without having to buy any commercial software. Scandisk can even be run from boot floppy (W9X), or the analogous command (chkdsk) from the NT/2000/XP recovery console.
Since you seem running win2k, check here for recovery console usage:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/using/productdoc/en/default.asp?url=/windowsxp/home/using/productdoc/en/recovery_run_console.asp
 
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