M15x 3 days old, dead

I hope someone here can help me, it looks like Dell's customer service is non existant, they have a recording stating they are down for scheduled maintenance.....call back another time. $2000 should buy better service.

I was using the lappy, and noted the keyboard stopped working. The touchpad was fine, as was everything else. I tried to restart the beast and now all i get is the black screen with the white dash at the top left. I have tried the keyboard test (passes) and am partially done with all the system tests in the F12 menu(im not real computer literate, but can find my way around ok)

HELP please, i just emptied a memory stik into the computer, then deleted the stik (to use it for transferring some files) Now my family pics are trapped in the dead laptop.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Dominic

 

well its fairly easy to retrieve data from the Hard drive,as long as you have another computer & and external enclosure. if not im sure someone on the fourm has one for sale or you can buy one from ebay.

second, i would try re-installing windows. obviously you want to wait until you retrieve your pics, or they will be gone forever. also dell usually has decent service most will atest to that. personally i would never keep important things on digital media. you should burn them to s disc at worst, and try to have them in more than one place if your planning on keeping them on digital media.

but your problem sounds like windows is kaput.

if you need more help, pm me and ill walk you through it

 

Your laptop is not dead, for the simple fact that when you boot it up, you have that blinking cursor. What that is, is the system is looking for a boot partition to boot from. Most likely your hard drive got corrupted (or failed), but your laptop is by no means dead.

 

Actually you probably could just take out the hard drive and get an enclosure and back up the files, do you have a monitor? Your gpu might have fried if everything this working or your screen fried what were you doing the last few days caused this to happen? I totally agree with you about the customer service! But hey it sucks when they have some type of scheduled maintenance and you run into this problem, but usually that never happens. But don't get too excited.

 

Or the cheapest and prolly easiest (not shortest though) solution would be to get a friend to install windows for you (on same partition as your old OS), without formating the partition, then you could back up your photos and then do a clean, nice, fresh, install.

 

this would work as well,all your files will be stored in a folder called windows.old. i would do this i forgot that you could do this im so used to wiping everything clean lol. just throwin your windows disk that came with the machine, and dont partition the hard drive like previously stated

 

You can use any windows cd/usb, even download a copy over the internet, install without serial number (you get 30 days of usage), do your thing and then use the recovery disk/partition to restore whatever you wish to restore.

 

wow, thanks

I have a copy of xp pro, just windows...but i am guessing that i need to install the same os that is on this computer. I have windows 7 home.

So, assuming i decide to try this, Can i download win 7 with my other laptop, put it on a flash drive or whatever, then stab that into the M15x? If so how big of a file is it?

If the pics are gone, then they are gone. I prob can replace most of them with previous saves done to cd. I just am not sure how many of them are not saved elsewhere. These flash drives were my "organized backup" of everything last time i had a crash.

Thanks for all the help,

Dominic

 

Did it not come with a respawn disc with windows 7 on it?

 

it did come with two discs. I am not sure, but i think one is the respawn. Can i use that to get windows back up without doing a destructive recovery?

 

One should be a respawn and one should be a typical Win 7 installation CD just branded with the Alienware logo, it should say Windows 7 Home Premium on it etc. Never used a respawn but if you reinstall with the other CD then you lose everything on the HDD.

 

Easiest and best thing to do is to get the pictures using an external enclosure. They can be had from newegg for a few dollars. Then just do a format and then use the respawn DVD. Another thing I might try just for the slight fact that it may work is do a power drain. Unplug the laptop, remove the battery and then hold the power button for 30 sec. Then remove the bottom and unplug the BIOS battery for a min to reset the BIOS. perhaps a setting got switched in the BIOS. Then plug everything back together and power it up. Try and see if that works. If not, then time to back up your family photos and do a system install.

 

Don't run the Respawn yet as it will probably format the partition in the process. Also it's most unlikely that you didn't get the OS DVD. It should be there by default along with the Resource DVD. If you find the W7 DVD choose the Repair option and you should be fine.
As for the data, I highly recommend this adapter for connecting your HDD externally. It has both SATA and IDE (including the old laptop IDE) and might come in handy on many occasions.

 

I hope i dont sound completely illiterate here, but, I have never hooked up an external hard drive, Can I hook up an external drive to my laptop in its current state and extract the contents of the hd thats in my lappy?

I will go look at my discs tonight, I do remember one being for reinstall of the entire system, the other didnt say much on it. Was kind of vague i think.

I dread having to deal with tech support as they can never understand me, as i cant understand them either. I have NO patience for them.

thank you all for your input and help with this

Dominic

 

No, you need to remove your internal HDD(the one with photos on it) and connect it (through the adapter/ext.enclousure) to any other PC (desktop or laptop) via a USB port to be able to retrieve your valuable data from it.

 

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/01/transfer-files-from-one-windows.html

 

You're funny

His laptop can't boot to use the "usb to usb" transfer.




Important:
Found another way (free and fast) to recover the photos and other personal data. Download Ubuntu_LIVE_CD from here, burn it to a CD/DVD on another computer. Boot from it from your laptop, choosing the first option in Ubuntu menu ("try Ubuntu without making changes..." or something like that), when booted, enter the Terminal (Accessories -> Terminal):
Now type in it:
sudo fdisk -l and press enter
You'll see something like this:

/dev/sda1 29 8369 66999082+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 * 8370 13995 45190845 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 13996 14593 4803435 5 Extended

The one with the "*" is the one you need to look at and then type:

sudo mount /dev/sda2

(replacing the "2" with the number you got (from the line with the "*")),
and press enter. Now you can browse to a folder with your data and copy it to a USB stick.
Hope this helps.