James Pine Has A Blog

Last night my 5 year old Dell Latitude 600 laptop started chugging along more slowly than usual. It had been a week or so since I last rebooted it, and a reboot almost always seems to have some short term positive impact on its performance. It took an extremely long time for it to start up again, the hard disk light was constantly lit and the drive sounded like a high speed drill.

My hard drive is partitioned into two sections, “operating system” and “data”, mounted to C: and E: drive letters respectively. Opening up “my computer” revealed the E: drive letter existed but had no size and was unacceptable. Running compmgmt.msc revealed the second partition still existed, was “healthy” but did not appear to be associated with a file system (should have been NTFS) and had “100% free space”. That didn’t seem promising. I tried booting into safe-mode to see if that would change anything, but it didn’t. Then I remembered an old friend, chkdsk. How long had it been since I’d typed that command? I’m guessing close to 10 years, probably when I had a computer running Windows 2000. I’ve typed fsck plenty of times on various machines running Linux, but chkdsk was a blast from the past.

A quick search on the web revealed the /F and /R options to fix errors and recover data from bad sectors were my friends. If my MBR was obliterated, then I was just out of luck. After about 30min, the laptop was up and running normally again, no data loss. I had last backed up the important data from it on September 5th, so I’d still be in decent shape anyway.

This is the second hard drive I’ve had in this laptop. The first succumbed to the click of death. I’m ready to buy a new laptop, but I’m hoping this one will last a few more weeks so I can get one with Windows 7 installed.