Another problem solved!
Sep. 9th, 2010 12:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poltr1When we last left this story, a friend of mine had given me his HP Pavilion laptop, which was getting an "NTLDR is missing" error when he booted up.
After discussing the problem with a computer-savvy colleague today, he theorized that the hard drive has a virus or is in the early stages of failure. So I took the hard drive out of the laptop, put it in an external enclosure, and performed a virus scan on it. It was clean. I then performed a backup on it, while listening to the drive. It took a little while to spin up, but the backup completed. I then restored the files to a spare WD Scorpio Blue 250 Gb hard drive, installed it in the laptop, and it's working fine now.
The puzzling thing is that none of the web sites I visited in the past couple of weeks that contained "NTLDR is missing" made no mention of impending hardware failure. Oh well. Live and learn.
Now to get a replacement for that spare hard drive I had. It's harder and harder to find PATA laptop hard drives these days. newegg.com has one for $80.
Oh yeah. Someone chucked an HP Pavilion DV9000 laptop in my trash bin. I fished it out and the aforementioned colleague wants it for spare parts.
Maybe that's my calling. To follow in the footsteps of Fred Sanford and run a computer salvage business.
After discussing the problem with a computer-savvy colleague today, he theorized that the hard drive has a virus or is in the early stages of failure. So I took the hard drive out of the laptop, put it in an external enclosure, and performed a virus scan on it. It was clean. I then performed a backup on it, while listening to the drive. It took a little while to spin up, but the backup completed. I then restored the files to a spare WD Scorpio Blue 250 Gb hard drive, installed it in the laptop, and it's working fine now.
The puzzling thing is that none of the web sites I visited in the past couple of weeks that contained "NTLDR is missing" made no mention of impending hardware failure. Oh well. Live and learn.
Now to get a replacement for that spare hard drive I had. It's harder and harder to find PATA laptop hard drives these days. newegg.com has one for $80.
Oh yeah. Someone chucked an HP Pavilion DV9000 laptop in my trash bin. I fished it out and the aforementioned colleague wants it for spare parts.
Maybe that's my calling. To follow in the footsteps of Fred Sanford and run a computer salvage business.
