HP laptop problems (PART 2)

If you've read my previous post about the problems I've been having with my HP dv6000 laptop, you might know about the workaround I found to turn the laptop on when it refuses by removing the battery first. If you've read the comments on that post, you might also know that that workaround stopped working a few weeks ago. So the laptop is again on it's way to HP for repair.


Backing up my data... but the laptop doesn't start!

I was a bit scared about my data on the hard drive at first. Since the laptop wouldn't turn on, I couldn't back up my recent data (actually a few photos of a special day and some of my girlfriends documents... and a NBA Live save game...). HP told me that there was nothing they could do. It's part of their repair process to reformat the drive and reinstall the system and they don't do backups. This is on their warranty agreement and they confirmed this on the phone. They also told me, here comes the good news, that I could remove the hard-drive and connect it to another computer to backup the data without violating the warranty agreement.

So I bought a 2.5'' SATA hard-drive case to connect the disk to a USB port on another computer. The case cost me about 13€.

Removing the disk from the laptop was no big deal. Is pretty simple. You do have to remove two screws but that is all.


Connecting the disk to another computer

I decided to connect it first to a Windows 2003 box. I just thought "since this was running windows, let's just connect it to a windows box to be safe". Well... I sure connected to the USB port... Windows detected something was connected and told me it was installing the necessary stuff. A few minutes later, the new hardware was ready... or was it? There was no new drive under "My Computer" so I went to "Disk Management" to try to see what was going on. Full lock up. The computer just hanged.

I didn't wait long until I connected the disk to my Ubuntu Linux box. About 3 seconds later, a pop-up appeared warning me the disk I had just connected was previously attached to a Windows box that wasn't properly terminated and therefore the filesystem might not be clean. I was given the choice to remove the disk, connect it back to a Windows box and safely remove it or force mount using the command line. The full command line needed was also displayed. Since I knew what might happen if I connected it back to the windows box, I forced the disk to mount read-only on the Linux box and backup up all my files without any problem.

Again, Linux saved the day!

Comments

  1. Unknown11 December 2007 at 15:19

    Sometimes, we just know better.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rui Covelo12 December 2007 at 17:21

    I got the laptop back yesterday. It starts. The service sheet says the motherboard was replaced and the BIOS updated. They didn't format the hard-drive...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Missing Win32_Product

Today I spent some frustrating time debugging a VBScript looking for an authentication problem that didn't exist. I was trying to a install an MSI file on a remote server and kept getting "SWbemServicesEx: A security package specific error occurred." Googling the error only drove me further in the wrong way. Only when I decided to run the script locally on the target computer I realised it wasn't an authentication problem. At least not any more. The error was now "SWbemServicesEx: Not found". I then noticed the Win32_Product class I was using to install the MSI files did not exist. I googled for the error and found lots of people with the same problem but no straightforward solution. Well... it turns out this was not the first time this happened to me... Maybe the next time this happens I google it and find my own blog post with the answer. It's as simple as this: "Add/Remove Programs" "Add/Remove Windows Components" "Management
Read more

Samsung CLP-300

I just bought a colour laser printer from Samsung. The CLP-300. Why the CLP-300? Most of my prints are text documents. From scientific papers to music tablatures and, off course, "how to" articles. I rarely print photos... and I definitely didn't want to buy a relatively good photo printer for a reasonable price and then spend the value of the printer per month in ink cartridges. I might be exaggerating a bit here but you get the idea. Laser printers are usually cheaper per print and therefore a cheap monochromatic laser printer seemed to be a good choice for me. I only had one more problem to solve. I live with my girlfriend and she would be using the printer too. The problem is she loves colours. My plan is ruined... or is it? I started looking for colour laser printers but most of them were very expensive. Much more than the monochromatic models. Enter the CLP-300. It's a small sized (at least for a laser printer), it's low priced and it's relativ
Read more

PowerShell: very simple FTP client

One of my first experiments with PowerShell, besides ls and HelloWorld.ps1, was trying the object oriented features and the .Net Framework. I was at the time thinking about a problem I was having with an FTP client I was using and I asked myself: "Would it be possible to make an FTP client with PowerShell?" I knew there was a .Net class that implemented an FTP client so I googled and bit and found it . After reading the examples shown and a little try-and-error, I came up with this extremely simple FTP client in PowerShell below. Note that by "extremely simple" I mean "with very few features and no error detection code". This only gets one file from the FTP server. I probably wouldn't use this in production without a few changes. But it's still a nice example on how to use the .Net framework with PowerShell and this class in particular $localfile = "c:\file.txt" $remotefile = "/folder/file.txt" $ftphost = "ftp://ftpserver&
Read more