Lappy BSOD & Reboot

[SuicidaL]

while i was on site today (on a hill in the middle of nowhere) checking well depths via a plc plug-in point my battery decided it had had enough and fancied a rest. now when i got home i plugged the charger in, started to boot it up. now got to the windows boot screen - but then there was a flash of the BSOD and the lappy promptly started to reboot itself. now it is doing it all the time no matter what i try (safe mode, last known good config etc etc).

does anyone know a way round this - it's the first time i've seen anything like this. would trying a repair install help? i can't even give the error code as the bsod is just a quick flash and it's gone.

[staffsMike]

I normally find that those symptoms point to an HDD faliure or windows corruption.. due to HDD faliure to be exact.

[aidanjt]

Try spinning up a Linux LiveCD and see if you can mount/recover your stuff. What's likely to have happened is when your battery died your NTFS filesystem got thrashed, so at the very least, you'll need to do a filesystem check and repair before attempting to recover the Windows installation. It'll probably be easier to reinstall the OS on a freshly laid out filesystem.

[SuicidaL]

Try spinning up a Linux LiveCD and see if you can mount/recover your stuff. What's likely to have happened is when your battery died your NTFS filesystem got thrashed, so at the very least, you'll need to do a filesystem check and repair before attempting to recover the Windows installation. It'll probably be easier to reinstall the OS on a freshly laid out filesystem.

well typing this via a LiveCD, unfortunately even though i can see the drive and see the windows/prog files folders etc etc i can't see any of my files that i need - my boss is gonna go nuts, although it might make his argument with the big bosses for a toughbook and pay rise (with some to come my way - i hope ) a bit easier.

don't suppose they'd let a lowly spark and software installer have one or even a decent lappy, preferably one with a battery with more power than an amoeba........................nah i doubt it




so it looks like a reformat and fresh install

[joz12345]

before you reinstall, try booting from the windows disk and trying a system restore. It sounds like your hdd got corrupted by the upexpected shutdown, so your boot sequence is failing. A system restore will restore your system to before the power cut. The same thing happened to me when i was overclocking, and windows decided to start installing an update just as it got a bsod, so i had to system restore from the windows vista disk to before i started overclocking. All worked fine after that.