knackered laptop...or is it?

antihero

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Paul
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Bare with me on this one......

MY cousin contacted me asking if I could look at her mums laptop. My cousin was pooing it as she had borrwed it off her mum now it's not working.

"Sure, bring it round". Oh my word. I don't think i've ever seen such an abused laptop. A key missing, the end of the dvd drive drawer drops off and the screen has a seriously bad flicker (although i believe this is an inherent problem with some Asus laptops). That's not to mention the state of the software. Initially it had the windows recovery malware, which i managed to get rid of. Installed got rid of the crappy avg free and installed MSE. Full scan and it was riddled with viruses. Tried cleaning it all off, now windows won't boot.

It's suppose to have a recovery partition. Tried everything to access it on boot (F9 etc) but no luck. Ah well, try a fresh install from disk. NOPE. Even though it's set to boot to disc, it wont (can hear it spinning up, but seems to bypass it, giving me the impression that the optical drive is knackered too).


My initial impression is that it has been dropped, or more than likely thrown. I've spent a good while trying to sort it, but now i'm getting a bit p****d off to be honest. If they can't look after it, why the **** should I spend all this time trying to sort it? Just wondering if there is any last ditch thing I could try before I give up/stop wasting my time?

think i'll just give it back to my aunt (she already knows about the dodgy screen and that its full of virii), and tell it's ******, full stop. Get a new one and never let your daughter/grandaughter touch it. And breath.
 
The other option would be to write an ISO file to USB stick and boot from that if the BIOS supports it. At least you could find out what's on the disk that way.
 
sounds like some of the laptops we've had back from users at work :lol:

sounds screwed to be honest..

you could make up a bart-PE disk and at least get any data off as andy said.
 
Have you got a spare hard drive I often switch them out, as the boot partition is not the same on the mass produced stuff. You could then transfer via a usb HD case
 
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