Is my HDD gone? (DELL laptop)

[TB303]

Hi guys,
I have a DELL latitude X1 laptop – that went haywire on me.
Last night I left it on without the battery (to drain it) – I’ve done it a hundred times before, it just shuts down and in the morning I turn it on again and everything is fine.

Today I turned it on and it BSODed on me – said ntfs.sys – I tried safe mode, no go.
I tried running the XP setup, and the recovery console, they all BSOD with the same ntfs.sys error.

I even tried BartPE – but it didn’t even boot, they all reach the same ntfs.sys error.
I’ll have to call DELL tech support, as I still have warranty, but I bet they are far less knowledgeable compared to the people in this forum.

Please advise, I need to at least get some of my files back!

Thanks!

[Sazar]

You have a business notebook hence a business warranty. Business warranty is stateside unless you call the wrong number.

Tech support, if you have gold service, will be able to assist you pretty well, if you get a level 1 tech, simply ask to speak to a higher level tech or see if someone can come over NBD and replace it for you.

It might just be a simple little thing, hopefully :) Maybe tech support will be able to get a work-around setup for you which will enable you to recover at least some data.

Hope this helps.

[nukem]

Im not win expert(I use a real OS Linux) but ntfs.sys has to do with your file system (NTFS) and since you let the laptop run till it dies windows might not of gone into sleep mode or turned off propery and when the battery ran out the system was trying to save a file so you might have a file system error. The other possiblity is that it might be your hard drive crapping out. Find out the make of your harddrive and goto the makers web site, most have tools now using S.M.A.R.T to see if your hard drive has a problem or not. Run that(its a boot disc) and if it says everything is fine then try to boot into some win CD and run fdisk. If there is a problem with your harddrive boot into knoppix or something and get the data off you need ASAP.

[TB303]

Im not win expert(I use a real OS Linux) but ntfs.sys has to do with your file system (NTFS) and since you let the laptop run till it dies windows might not of gone into sleep mode or turned off propery and when the battery ran out the system was trying to save a file so you might have a file system error. The other possiblity is that it might be your hard drive crapping out. Find out the make of your harddrive and goto the makers web site, most have tools now using S.M.A.R.T to see if your hard drive has a problem or not. Run that(its a boot disc) and if it says everything is fine then try to boot into some win CD and run fdisk. If there is a problem with your harddrive boot into knoppix or something and get the data off you need ASAP.

Mate, I tried Knoppix,
but when I run it on the laptop it says: "can't find KNOPPIX filesystem" - and runs a really minimal shell where I can't do anything.

I tired the same cd on my desktop machine, and Wow! full blowen graphic interface, it recognised my audigy sounds card (Not my 6800GT though) - and connected to the internet (through my Linksys router) all by itself!

Linux has sure gone a long way since 99' ;-))

Can you help me boo tthe knoppix?

EDIT:

OK,
turns out that for new DELL laptops (X1) thr bot command is:
knoppix fromhd=/dev/uba

works like a charm and I saved my files!