T 42 Hard drive will not boot

[dcalvert]

I've read a few similar posts below, and am wondering if I am going in the wrong direction...

When I shut down my Think Pad, I always put it in standby mode.

Last night, I shut it down at home...drove to the office,and tried to power it up as usual. It would not come out of standby using the usual method (hitting the function key alone).

I tried hitting the main power button - all the lights came on, the fan began, and the DVD began to spin - but no hard drive indicator. did this for a couple hours...while I was checking Ebay for a new hard drive.

Took it home, convinced it was dead. Set it up on my desk, hit the power button, and it came alive...completely normal now...except I'm afraid to shut it down again. Had backed up the data the night before...so not a problem there..

At this point I have a new hard drive arriving in the morning...but after reading posts here...not so sure that's going to fix the problem

Two questions:

1.) how can i determine if it's a hard drive issue vs the GPU problem that i've read about below?
2.) if it is a hard drive problem, I take it it is not easy to Ghost these to another hard drive...what's the best way to do this (going to give it to a computer guy who does this for a living...sounds beyond me).

Thanks in advance.

Dean Calvert

[syedj]

Hi Dean,

Welcome to the forum!

Since you already have a new hard drive coming in, using it instead of the old hard drive will at least eliminate one possibility.

There are ghosting and imaging instructions in the forum. You can perhaps try to do it yourself and if that doesn't work give it to your tech guy.

Also, for future when your laptop is fixed, instead of putting the laptop in the Standby for an extended period of time put it in Hibernation. In Standby mode there is a slight battery discharge since the machine needs to keep the RAM and a few other components powered. If you leave a machine in Standby it can eventually drain the battery to nill. However, in the Hibernation all the contents of the RAM are written on the hard drive and the machine is completely powered off. This saves power state of the battery without any discharge.

[Johan]

1.) How can i determine if it's a hard drive issue vs the GPU problem that i've read about below?

Dean,

To investigate if your harddisk is about to fail, you may use one of the tools mentioned in the thread T41 noise - rhythmic brief pitch change every 3-4 seconds (see the post of Sat Mar 29, 2008 4:18 pm and the links therein).

To test your T42, use the "PC Doctor" program; see e.g. the thread T41 Wireless Upgrade --> Dead Mobo?? (the post of Wed Apr 02, 2008 11:24 am).

To clone your existing harddisk, I recommend download an evaluation copy of Acronis True Image - it will do the job for free. Alternatively, if your source or target (= new!) harddisk is a Seagate, you may download (also free of charge!) Seagate's "DiscWizard" - their customized "for-use-with-Seagate-HDDs-only" version of Acronis True Image (a link is found in the thread set up new 160g seagate hard drive for T40). No need to pay anybody for doing this cloning - there is plenty of help about how to clone on this forum.

Johan

[Tim M]

To clone your existing harddisk, I recommend download an evaluation copy of Acronis True Image - it will do the job for free. Alternatively, if your source or target (= new!) harddisk is a Seagate, you may download (also free of charge!) Seagate's "DiscWizard" - their customized "for-use-with-Seagate-HDDs-only" version of Acronis True Image (a link is found in the thread set up new 160g seagate hard drive for T40). No need to pay anybody for doing this cloning - there is plenty of help about how to clone on this forum.

The one potential issue with this approach (learned by hard experience a couple of weeks ago on my part) is that the new drive must be installed in the laptop (with the old drive in an external enclosure) for the cloning to work. In this situation, the trial version of Acronis will not allow you to do a clone outside of Windows, which is apparently a necessary component of this process.