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    X200s disk crashed, now what?

    Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by avivz, Apr 3, 2009.

  1. avivz

    avivz Newbie

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    Hi all,

    My 2 months old X200s got a disk crash of some sort-
    It had latest XP on it, and it boots into blue-screen, in any type of mode (safe mode, regular, network, debug, etc), and then will restart, and blue screen, etc.
    Needless to say I didn't do anything unusual with the laptop in the days prior to the crash. Dunno why it happened.

    I guess I can try to mount the hard-drive into a portable cradle to get whatever is possible off it, and then maybe rebuild XP on the laptop.
    I've never had a problem with my previous X40, so I dont know how recovery works in these cases (remember it doesnt have a cd or so)-
    Are there any simple ways to recover?
    Is it simple to boot from a network CD with XP installation cd, and rebuild the OS on it?
    Does Lenovo provide with a pre-built image for the laptop, or do I need to start installing all the utilities again?

    Would love to get advices...


    Thanks :)
     
    avivz, Apr 3, 2009
    #1
  2. jonlumpkin

    jonlumpkin NBR Transmogrifier

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    If you press the Blue (ThinkVantage) button before Windows attempts to start you should enter the Lenovo preload Rescue & Recovery utility.

    The primary purpose of this is to recover the system to factory condition (drivers/utilities pre-installed), but you also should be able to pull data files off the laptop and archive them to USB or network storage.

    You can also try booting into Safe Mode (F8 after BIOS, before Windows) and see if you can save your files there.

    In the future, ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR DATA TO ANOTHER MACHINE OR DISK.
     
    jonlumpkin, Apr 3, 2009
    #2
  3. t30power

    t30power Notebook Deity

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    You should try checking the disk on another machine, maybe running CHKDSK most probably there are some sectors damaged, one way to tell is look at the description on the BSOD at the top of the screen.
     
    t30power, Apr 3, 2009
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  4. jaredy

    jaredy Notebook Virtuoso

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    And if some of the boot sectors were screwed up on the disk...you could try pulling it out and doing a direct copy of the drive in a linux os and back it up just so you have a mirror of the damaged disk. From there you could hopefully repair whatever it necessary (boot/filesystem) if that is all the issue is and then recover the data or mirror it back to a new hard drive that doesn't have screwed up sectors.
     
    jaredy, Apr 3, 2009
    #4
  5. Renee

    Renee Notebook Virtuoso

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    You could accomplish the same with vista.
    -Renee
     
    Renee, Apr 3, 2009
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