Over a stormy sky

Catastrophe

The laptop crashed last week out of the blue, rendering all of my saved data in the hard disk unrecoverable. After days of running around in panic, trying to salvage data with uncle J's help, it turns out that the hdd was totally fried. Data gone. Lucky most of my impt data was in my thumbdrive, which I immediately backed up in my desktop.

The stupid HD laptop bay is damned frustrating. To open it up, I need a phillips screwhead, a starshaped screw head, and a long-nose plier just to remove the 3 different sets of screws for the mounting. I spent more than $300 buying a set of screwdrivers, and 2 new HDD; one internal 2.5" and one external to serve as a backup drive. Problem solved? Nope. Firstly, installing the new hdd into the laptop was a mistake. I didn't have an internal CD drive, and somehow the bios didn't allow my HP laptop to boot from the USB CD drive. So cannot install. I had to strip it back out and plug the HDD into my desktop, using a 2.5" ide adapter which Uncle J kindly lent me. Tralala, Format, partition, install winxp, update, update, update.....

Thinking that now I have a bootable hdd, I plugged it out and installed it back into the laptop, and turned it on.

.... Bloody thing couldn't load. !@#@#!@#!@ It keeps hanging after the screen where you choose to either run normally or boot in safe mode.


Now for the kick in the balls: I plugged my desktop HDD back in (which I previously removed when I was installing stuff on the laptop hdd), and it won't work!!!! now, it keeps hanging after the 'Verifying DMI Pool' screen. I tried playing with the bios settings, switching IDE and power cables, master/slave configs..... nothing. Still cannot work.

So now I have an inoperable desktop and an inoperable laptop. Ironically enough, my laptop HDD now works on my desktop. Argh. Why won't it work on my laptop?? Could it be because the new 5200 rpm hdd can't be supported by my laptop motherboard? The old one was only 4200. Or could it be that when my laptop malfunctioned, the damage was to some part other than the hdd? Then why can't I read my old hdd?? And why did it show severe bad sectors during recovery?

Argh! Why is this happening to me???

posted by Tempest Blue @ 2:25 PM