Laptop fall down, go boom

[rickvs]

So, my primary computer has eaten its own hard drive, I think. It's a Sony VAIO laptop, and it started making ...chewing noises that put me in mind of a Zip cartridge's death rattle. Now it won't recognize an OS on bootup, so I'm posting this from my ancient tower, the one that's powered by little steam engines manned by hamsters. David has kindly offered to stop by and look at it, and I've already dug the floppy drive out of storage (I can have either a floppy drive or a CD drive plugged into the laptop's bay, but not both. This shall make recovery ...interesting). I think I'll be spending my day recreating the graph revisions for my wife's dissertation, those being the most important documents on the laptop, and will probably be eulogizing the rest of the files later). I don't like dealing with CompUSA's service department, but since that's where I bought it, perhaps they have a secondary hard drive that I could plug into the bay instead, one with an operating system and some extra space to use as a lifeboat. Of course this machine is long out of warranty :

Comments

[gundo.livejournal.com]

It may be possible to mount the hard drive in your tower case, boot the tower to Linux using Knoppix, and then pull the files off of the laptop drive. Knoppix would be able to work past a corrupted MBR, and may be able to recover other files.

Mounting rails for a laptop drive are about 20 bucks. Knoppix is free. Hope this helps.