[tjwhite]

Hi everyone,

Firstly, I apologize for missing anything here as I am new to the forum. I would really appreciate any help as this has been very frustrating. I have spent the entire evening attempting to fix my girlfriend's laptop. It is a Dell Inspiron 1525 running Windows Vista.

My initial problem was dealing with what I am fairly sure was a virus that redirected all search engine links to other sites. Unfortunately, this also had the effect of closing any anti virus programs I attempted to run such as Spybot Search and Destroy and avast! that I have running on her computer.

I finally attempted to run Panda Active Scan as this runs through a browser. While running this, the computer unexpectedly shut down. When restarting, I now get a blue screen and the error message STOP: c000021a everytime. I cannot start in safe mode or use any of the other startup options.

Not sure if this means anything but I ran the system diagnostics and got the following errors when running a scan on the system memory:

Error Code: 0142
Message: Error Code 2000-0142
Hard Drive1 - Self Test Unsuccessful
Status: 79

At this point, I realize from reading other threads that I will most likely need to reformat the hard drive. However, if possible I would really like to recover some of the hard drive files. Is this possible through any kind of command prompt and backup utility or will I need to have someone else do this for me?

I know that usually you would require logs and other information from the computer in order to help me out but as I cannot access Windows at all I don't believe this is possible.

Sorry about the long post and I appreciate any help you can give me.

Thanks.

[joeten]

Hi and welcome to TSGF the failure on the hdd selftest would indicate the hdd is the issue you could download the hdd diagnostic tool form the hdd manufacturers support site and burn to a disc then run it.
First i would back up your data to either a usb devie or disc try using this http://www.ubuntu.com/ and follow this http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...dows-computer/ to get your data
use this to burn the disc http://www.google.co.uk/url?q=http:/...vrd4wsDXq3mGLA

[tjwhite]

Hi,

Thanks a lot for the reply. I've been following the instructions you linked me to and unfortunately, I have a problem. When I go to the computer window in Ubuntu there is no reference to the computer's hard drive. The only choices are:
-Cd Drive
-MEDIADIRECT
-OS
-Filesystem

From there I went to the terminal and attempted to mount the drive. I used the "fdisk -l" command to show the list of drives. I believe it is telling me that /dev/sda3 is my drive as it is the one with the most data on it. When I run the command to mount the drive I get the following message:

"ntfs attr pread i: ntfs pread failed: input/output error. Failed to read NTFS Bitmap: Input/output error. SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory. Please see the "dmraid" documentation."

Sorry about the detail but I want to make sure you have as much information as possible. I am worried that this may mean that there is a physical problem with the hard drive and it may be unrecoverable. Please advise on what my next step should be. Thanks again for the help.

[tjwhite]

Hi again, sorry to double post but I realized that I forgot to tell you that I do seem to be able to mount one of the drives. I believe it is the recovery part of the harddrive though there doesn't seem to be any of the files I need on there. Is it possible to recover anything from this drive? Thanks again.

[joeten]

Hi to take things further you need the advice of the linux community the folks there are far more skilled in the use of these distros than me i dabble from time to time and would not wish to give you bad advice please ask here http://forums.techguy.org/22-unix-linux/ sorry i can't be of more help i do believe you may be stuck with a paperweight for a drive but i may well be wrong i certainly hope so goodluck

[tjwhite]

Ok, thanks a lot for the help. I have posted to the other forum. I really appreciate what you guys do here, just wish Dell didn't make such crap hardware. Thanks again!

[joeten]

hi your welcome sorry i could not help more maybe one day i will spend more time on linux