Troubleshoot and repair your laptop

There is a snag: the donor disk needs to be identical to the failed one. You can often get away with a disk of a different capacity, but it’s vital that it belongs to the same model range.

Naturally, sourcing a suitable donor becomes harder as time goes by, especially as model ranges cease production. So, checking Ebay for a cheap second-hand unit is your best bet. One of the laptops here at PCW is a four-year-old Tiny-branded affair, and it took us only 10 minutes to track down a donor for its 80GB Hitachi; it was selling for pennies, too.

Putting the boot In
Failed hard disks aren’t the only cause of startup problems. And if you’ve established that the Bios still recognises the disk, you could have a problem with the Windows boot loader. The most likely cause of that is an improper shutdown, perhaps as the result of a random crash or insufficient battery power.

Installing other operating systems can also play havoc with the boot loader. Luckily, the problem can usually be fixed with your Windows setup disc (borrow a friend’s if you only have a copy of the manufacturer’s ‘recovery’ CD).

For Windows XP, boot from the CD. At the prompt of ‘To set up Windows XP now, press Enter’, press Enter. Next, press F8 to accept the licence. Once the wizard detects the presence of an existing installation, press R to start a repair. Essentially, XP will then reinstall, but don’t panic ­ – all your programs and data will remain intact. After a reboot, you should be good to go.

For Vista, boot up from the Vista DVD and work through the selection of language, keyboard layout and so on. Eventually, you’ll see a button inviting you to ‘Install now’. Ignore that and instead click the link labelled ‘Repair your computer’. Click Next and you’ll be presented with five options –­ Startup Repair, System Restore, Windows Complete PC Restore, Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool and Command Prompt. Choose Startup Repair.

If none of that helps and you suspect the hard disk is faulty (listen for tell-tale clicking and scraping sounds), all that matters is salvaging the data. One way of doing this is to take the disk out and drop it into a USB enclosure. Hook it up to another PC and try to access it through Windows Explorer. Unless it’s completely dead, which is quite rare, you should be able to copy the data to another location.

A better option –­ and one with a much quicker transfer rate ­ – is to connect the disk directly to a desktop PC’s motherboard. If the disk is a Pata unit (as opposed to a Sata), you’ll need an adapter, as the interfaces on 2.5in laptop and 3.5in desktop drives are different. These will cost around £5 from sites such as Ebay ­ – well worth the cost of your data. There’s a detailed guide in our feature on upgrading laptops.