Episode #62
Salvaging a Hardware

My laptop recently started giving me a MAJOR problem, it’s pretty much not booting up anymore. First off, my laptop is kind of old. It’s an IBM thinkpad A20m (God bless its hart). When I put it on, it now gives me this error message: We apologize for the inconvenience, but windows did not start successfully. A recent hardware or software change might have causes this…Yada Yada Yada. Will you like to start windows normally, on safe mode, etc.(I’ve tried all options). After that I get a second error message which says: A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your comuter. Yada Yada Yada Technical information: ****Stop: (a sequence of numbers and symbols follow) Then it restarts automatically and repeats this cycle of errors I’ve even tried using the windows installation disk, but I still can’t get through these error messages. Does this mean it’s time to put the poor old thing to rest and start saving up for a macbook? And is it possible to still get all the contents in it’s hard drive. I’ll be most grateful If I can be assisted with this! Thanks in advance Leo and the crew :)

Chidi, Montreal, QC



The good news is that even if the machine itself is dead in the water — which I wouldn’t bet on — you can get the data off of it fairly easily yourself, but you’ll have to invest $30 - $45 into an external hard drive enclosure for 2.5-inch hard drives. Many Windows-centric notebook manufacturers place the hard drive behind an easily-accessible door on the bottom of the notebook, and it should require little more than a jeweller’s screwdriver and a bit of careful fingerwork to get the drive out (in a static-free environment!) and into the new case. You should then be able to plug the new external hard drive into another computer and recover your important data.

It’s possible that the computer isn’t kaput yet, however—that ominous warning can simply mean a bad problem with the windows installation. You might be able to get the system up and running again by simply wiping the drive and reinstalling Windows. (Back up your data, as above, first!) If it keeps blue-screening even after a clean install, it’s probably the hardware. But the good news: Macbooks ARE nice and shiny.

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