PC help needed

[wijit]

Righty-ho. We have an Acer laptop which has behaved quite well so far. Now, it's changed it's mind and decided to be a bit of a git. It will not start up properly, when it starts it goes fine but takea about 8 minutes to get past the black "windows xp" screen. It then goes to a blue screen (not the blue screen of death) where it says "one of your disks needs to be checked for consistency" etc. But it doesn't actually start the check, it stays on 0%. We have the cd's for recovery you always get asked to do when you very first start up from new but if I do that I lose every thing which is bad because there's a,lot of important photo's on there which we really do not want to lose.
Can anyone offer any good advice?

[Shire Shrimp]

How long do you give it to move off 0%? I had a similar problem with a PC at work, it took about 3/4 hour to move off 0%, then another hour or so to complete the check. The machine works fine now (touch wood!)

[wijit]

Hi. It's been on zero for around 90 minutes now. There no "whirring" from the hard drive.

[Keith]

...but if I do that I lose every thing which is bad because there's a,lot of important photo's on there which we really do not want to lose.
Can anyone offer any good advice?

At this point you start to pray and promise that you will back stuff up in future!

Blackbox are Acer dealers if you need to go down that route. If it's a choice between paying for a repair or DIY but lose photos, cash will be changing hands.

For everyone who doesn't back stuff up... http://www.ebuyer.com/product/128465

£50 for 500GB... why wouldn't you back up your photos & videos?

Wijit, if you can get past it and it does boot up, get a back up ASAP.

[wijit]

Cheers keith. I can always rely on you to state the bloody obvious (retrosepctively! ) The latest is that it has in the last few minutes put itself up to 17% complete. Although it didn't bother with the 1-16% first. On the screen, above the 17% it says it has replaced bad clusters in some files. This is odd as I regulary do my disk checks and defrags. But at least something is happening. Will update again in case anyone else comes across this.

[Keith]

leave it alone and good luck!

Ordered that external hard drive then?

[campdave]

I upload all my pictures to Flickr. Safer than any kind of back-up in case my house goes on fire and my back-ups burn too!

[marky No.1]

leave it alone and good luck!

Ordered that external hard drive then?

be quick tho - they have only 3522 left!

[Mighty Red]

be quick tho - they have only 3522 left!

Oh no they haven't.

[marky No.1]

be quick tho - they have only 3522 left!

Oh no they haven't.

Selling at a rate of 30 per hour - told ya to be quick! SV's should be on commission

[wijit]

Latest is not good. It took over 5 hours to go through the disk check and then restarted itself.
The it just carried on restarting and getting no further than the black screen.
Bugger.

[Christies Child]

Took Keith's advice some time back about external hard drive.

Best purchase I've made for some time.

Even came in useful for uploading a clients artwork after their disk burner packed in.


Now there's a thought...claim it back on my expences!!!!!!!!!