Last week, I turned on one of our laptops and got a beep and that horrifying message “Internal HDD HARD error”. I felt a little sick, because, as way too many of us do, I hadn’t taken the time to fix the problem I was having with our automatic backup. So, there it was, the ugly error message saying that we had possibly lost all work done on that laptop for the last couple of months.
I did a little debugging and found that the hard drive was probably OK, but the hardware controlling the laptop had gone bad. Apparently, it’s a common problem in this particular laptop. I tried moving the hard drive to another computer, but only encountered messages saying that there was a password on the hard drive that was unknown and unbreakable.
So, I bought an enclosure to try to access it from my other laptop which had a SATA drive and not an IDE drive (which the broken computer used). That still didn’t work…for some reason, my laptop would not access it no matter what I did. So, I started reading and found a very interesting solution.
This is what I did to access my data:
The data was saved! And even better, I discovered that Linux is great about recognizing the other devices on the computer, so I was able to use the wireless mouse and even able to configure it to access the internet. After I configured it the way that I liked it, I put an unused USB memory stick in and saved my configuration file to it. The CD operating system pulls the configuration file from the memory stick when I boot up so that I don’t have to configure it each time.
So now, even though we wouldn’t try to use the computer for much, it is still very useful as a backup computer and internet device!
Huge Kudos to all Linux developers, especially those responsible for Puppy Linux!
Tips: You might have to change your boot order to get the laptop to boot from your CD. My computer already defaulted that way, but on some, you might need to press F2 or something like that during bootup.
