HP laptop won't fix itself.... tried other options

originally posted by: ArMaP
a reply to: Gothmog

And if you format the disk you can avoid the bad sectors.

I had a computer with two half disks, one had the first half unusable, the other the second half, but those good halves kept on working without a problem for some years more, until I stopped using that computer.

And if you format the disk you can avoid the bad sectors.

Low level format only marks those sectors as unuseable .
If you run check disk with the /r that will most likely remap the bad sectors (software wise) as the physical bad sectors have already been remapped by the drives firmware.
And , it is a lot less painful.

a reply to: Gothmog

Nothing was working on the affected area of those disk, not even formatting.

originally posted by: ArMaP
a reply to: Gothmog


Nothing was working on the affected area of those disk, not even formatting.

Just like I said , it will only mark those sectors as unuseable.
With physical bad sectors , once the amount of the spare sector pool is exceeded , a low level format will possibly revive the drive that way.
And that was most likely an IDE drive.

Thanks again to every one of you for trying to help.
All is good so far, and we'r going to back up and consider a SSD in the near future.

Also, I did a new thread....just because I always wanted to get opinions on BIOS updates.
I am no fan.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

a reply to: Gothmog

PM for you

a reply to: DontTreadOnMe

No you cannot officially turn off any decent antivirus. AV loads itself into cpu registers at boot so you have to usually remove the software and reboot . I use webroot and only install malwarebytes to run if i think there is a problem.

a reply to: Gothmog

It was an old IDE drive, I usually use my disks until they completely die, moving them from computer to computer. In this computer, on a new disk, I still have files from 15 years and three computers 22 years and five computers ago.

I had a similar problem a few months ago. Basically any time I let my computer turn off, for any reason, it wouldn't start again. If it happened due to an update, I just had to let the update uninstall itself.

I didn't let it repair itself (I've had really bad experiences letting it do that, and also I use a custom hard drive setup called "gui partition" that might get messed up by it.)

I just rebooted it like 10 or 15 times until it got in once. It was usually after I unplugged my wireless keyboard from the USB. - But that might have been just luck.

So for several months, I just left my computer turned on non-stop. (And it ran just fine so long as it stayed turned on.)




The Solution for me was: I downloaded a program called "auslogistics" I think that was it anyway. And I had it look through my drivers.


One device driver was messed up, or I think it wasn't the driver itself, but just its registry entry.

After all the work they've put into the operating system, the loader is barely improved over where it was in the 90's. One single device driver, for any device, and it doesn't know what to do and panicks.


And these days, computers have so many devices. And I'm sure each update does something to affect them.

But they never bother to work on improving the way the loader deals with device faults.

a reply to: DontTreadOnMe

mate I had a similar problem , my media drive was reporting errors , so I wanted to format it , I formatted it and it worked but anyway during that process I wanted to upgrade my machine from win 7 > 8.1 > windows 10 , my machine was originally win 7 but I upgraded to 8.1
and I wanted to install a new SSD and put my OS on that instead of the HDD

so I had to put my drive back to win 7 then install to win 10 to get the free upgrade
in that process I also managed to format one of the wrong drives

it was a pain in the ass to do all this took me ages , but I created the win10 installation USB from files here

Download windows 10

I think the best route forward for you is to buy a new SSD for the laptop , install win10 onto that , then just format the old drives, and then use a data recovery tool to scan the drive and recover the files you need
the recovery tools are ok they seem to recover all the deleted data from the drives.

PM me or whatever or I can give you my discord channel if you want to go through it one night

although the really # thing about windows 10 is now my pc doesnt recognise my DVD drive and my printer or my scanner thanks to windows and the manufacturers not supporting each other (most likely in a bid to get everyone to buy new products, thanks )

If you're going to use a recovery tool, why not just plug the hard drive into a working machine, and remove the data off of it manually?

Then you can just take the stuff you want and leave all the junk. Fry's sells hard drive enclosures for about 10 bucks, which can convert your internal hard drive into a USB external.


When my computer was glitching I didn't have that option because my system hard drive is a pair of 4 terabyte drives set up in a Raid0 array. I had to use a special setup called something like "gui partition" because most hard drive controllers can't handle a drive larger than 4 tb without it. (And also this meant that both drives had to work simultaneously in order to get any data off of them.)


So there would have been no way to recover my data.



But also the error message I was getting on startup was "page fault in a non-paged sector" So if you're not getting that message, then your boot problem is probably different than my boot problem was.


I've had a couple of laptops fail just because they got a bad display driver. I've learned never to let my laptops upgrade their display drivers automatically if the current drivers are working ok, because the manufacturer always, sooner or later, puts out an update that has a glitch in it.