Check Disk screen...

M

microwolf96

Poster
Joined
Jun 26, 2010
Messages
230
Well, hey guys. Haven't been on the forums in a while.

But, I had something a bit alarming happen to my mom's laptop today.

I had the power settings set to not sleep/hibernate/turn off the laptop when the lid was closed because I was running Virus scans, Spyware scans, and defragging the hard drive. However, when I came back to the computer today, I had a Check Disk screen up. It was frozen, too. Which alarmed me. It was stuck at "Press any key to continue within the next 10 second(s)."

I couldn't press any keys to get out of the screen, not even ctrl+alt+delete, as the keyboard was disabled for some odd reason. I left it alone for a minute and it still sat there.

At this point, I just did a force shutdown and restarted it. It got stuck at the same point again. It hadn't even gotten into the operating system.

I'm on the laptop now, only due to the fact that just after it froze again, I accidentally hit the button on the side of the laptop that opens the dvd tray. For some reason, this allowed it to move on. It continued to the OS and let me log in.



If anyone can give me some information on why this happened it would be great. I'm sort of worried I'll have to reinstall or something, and there's a lot of family pictures and videos on here.

There was a disk in the dvd drive, too. A movie called "White Noise" that I watched some time back in early November/late October.
 
Sounds like the harddrive could be dying.
Why not plug in the HDD to your main rig to get the pictures off of it, as well as maybe run an error check on it.
 
This may be obvious, but did you try taking the DVD out of the drive? The boot order on the laptop may be trying to run from the DVD first. If the DVD has a session for data files (extra content and the like), then it may be confusing the laptop.

If removing the DVD solves the problem, then you can probably modify the boot order in the BIOS to always attempt to boot from the hard drive first.
 
Im kinda with Phobus on this one, but id suggest try booting an ubuntu live cd, if it takes more than 3-4 minute to boot the live disc, unhook the HD and try to boot it again. Just incase...if you can get access to it...get the pics off :P you can also use the ubuntu live cd to mount the HD and pull the pics off.
 
@ Phobus - I don't think you can put a laptop hard drive in a desktop machine. There are no other laptops in the house, either. I've already run an error check and it found no errors.

@ Squirrel - I don't have the boot priorities set to read the CD Drive first, so I don't think that's the problem. It does it without anything in the CD drive as well.

@ Monkey - You mean running the Ubuntu installer disk's preview thing?

@ Monkey + Phobus - I've already transferred all the pictures to my dad's 1.5tb external hard drive.

Any other possible ideas? The only thing my dad could think of was maybe the hard drive is dying from being in so much heat since I don't have a cooling mat for this yet.
 
Monkey, using a Live CD doesn't not interfere with the primary hard drive unless called upon. I would assume the disc drive itself is the factor in speed.

Me thinks the hard drive could be on the fritz as well. How long have you had it for?
 
I've also had this problem when a USB device is connected, so that's something to check out. My external USB drive sometimes causes these issues. Otherwsie, I'd look into fixing the master boot record on your drive, as that might also be the cause.

Because of the DVD tray quirk, I'm pretty firmly convinced it has something to do with boot order, though.
 
mattM_- said:
Monkey, using a Live CD doesn't not interfere with the primary hard drive unless called upon. I would assume the disc drive itself is the factor in speed.

Me thinks the hard drive could be on the fritz as well. How long have you had it for?
Click to expand...

Eh, sorry for the late response, but we bought this laptop for my mom back in... August? I can't remember exactly when, but I know it's not more than a year old.
 
For a laptop so new, its kinda hard to believe its the HDD going out that caused the error...... You say you have the boot order correct so it shouldnt be that.......other than the 2 times you mention above, has the error happened anymore times? If you are still getting the error, then you may want to try and restore the OS back to before you had the errors becasue what you were doing may have hurt the Master Boot record (like flippy mentioned). If that doesnt work, then I would try and reinstall the OS before giving the HDD the boot.
 
@thebigrobbyrob - It only happens when theres a disk in the cd drive on bootup, so I've left disks out of it every time I turn it on now. So, I'm not experiencing it anymore.

It's kinda weird though...

My boot priorties:
-Hard Drive
-CD Drive
-USB
-etc

So yeah, my boot priorities aren't the problem.

Dunno why it does this only when theres a disk of some sort in the cd drive.
 
iiNfamous said:
@thebigrobbyrob - It only happens when theres a disk in the cd drive on bootup, so I've left disks out of it every time I turn it on now. So, I'm not experiencing it anymore.

It's kinda weird though...

My boot priorties:
-Hard Drive
-CD Drive
-USB
-etc

So yeah, my boot priorities aren't the problem.

Dunno why it does this only when theres a disk of some sort in the cd drive.
Click to expand...

Strange. Well, if you isolate the problem to there then its all good (an easy fix)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Back
Top