Laptop won't boot

Hi, Gary!
I'm trying to backup my files to USB. I've been using these instructions which you provided for me in your last post.

• Click on sdb1 to mount and open the USB drive.
• Click on the sda drive which contains the files you wish to transfer (on my machine it is sda3)
• You should now see something similar to the image below.

At this portion, when I click on to sda1, its' window opens. It says:
ATA FUJITSU MHT2080A
sda1 ntfs 74.5G

There are no icons.
I don't have sda's; I just have sdb1, the USB and sr0, the CD/DVD drives.

If you have no sda drives showing on the Puppy Desktop, then it looks like your Hard Drive may be faulty, in which case Puppy will not be unable to load it.

There's not much we can do if that is the case.

Whether your drive can be tested and/or repaired I couldn't say, that's not really my area of expertise. It might be worth posting at one of the "General Help" forums to see if they have any suggestions.

Below are links to a few ...

http://forums.whatthetech.com/index.php?showforum=126
http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/forum/9- ... ripherals/
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/forum7.html

Please feel free to refer them to this topic if you wish to let them know what we've done so far.

Hi, Gary!
I'm not sure whether I explained well enough. The icon for sda1 is on the desktop, but when I opened it, I can't find the files to copy. I got the Precise Puppy and the icons are all different than what is shown on the sites which I've visited for tutorials on backing up with Puppy Linux. Should I perhaps use an earlier version or do you still think the Hard Drive is faulty? I'm thinking that the User is faulty!

If you've got a SDA drive showing on your Desktop, then that is your hard drive.

Usually, to open a drive you just need to double click on it, but I don't usually use the Precise version of Puppy. On some versions, to open a drive you have to right click on the drive, and select to "mount" the drive.

However your machine is XP, and the illustrations in the tutorial I linked you to are taken from a Vista/W7 machine, so your personal files will not be in the same location as they are in the tutorial.

On XP when you open the sda drive, you need to open the following folders in the order given .... Documents and Settings ... Username (where Username is replaced by the name of the account you usually log into) ... My Documents

Your personal files and folders will be in the My Documents folder, and you should be able to drag and drop them to your USB drive (sdb) as described in the tutorial I linked to earlier.

Hi, Gary!
I figured out how to get to the files, although I haven't yet accomplished that.
I don't know if I messed something up whilst trying to manipulate this program, but this is the error message I get now when I try to get it to mount sda1:

Pmount Puppy Drive Mounter
Error: unable to mount sda1

It mounts sbd1 and sr0. Do you think I should uninstall the Puppy and reinstall it or an earlier version?

That's the error message you usually get if a disk is damaged or corrupted.

Pmount is the utility that Puppy uses to load (mount) the various drives on your computer. The fact that it will mount your USB proves the utility is working OK, and therefore it's your Hard Drive (sda) that has problems.

You can try another version of Puppy if you wish, but I don't believe you'll have any more success. As far as I know they all use the same version of Pmount.

Try contacting one of the Hardware Forums I listed earlier, they may have some ideas about how to resolve things.

Oh! I was afraid of that!
Thank you, Gary, for all of your help. I will do that.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Hope the Hardware guys are able to give you better tidings than I have.

Good luck.

Gary

I appreciate your help, Gary! It's so good to talk to you again! Qaleghqa'mo' jIQuch
Here's a link to the post there: Laptop won't boot

Ooh, haven't seen any Klingon in a long time , good to see you as well.

I'll leave this topic open for a couple of days or so until we find out whether the hardware guys at WTT can iron out your problem or not.

Hahaha! not yap wa' Hol
This is what rshaffer61 has posted back to me:

Sounds like a possible hard drive failure from your description.
The next logical step is to check the hard drive by doing the following.

Run hard drive diagnostics: http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287
Make sure, you select tool, which is appropriate for the brand of your hard drive.
Depending on the program, it'll create bootable floppy, or bootable CD.
If downloaded file is of .iso type, use ImgBurn: http://www.imgburn.com/ to burn .iso file to a CD (select "Write image file to disc" option), and make the CD bootable.

NOTE. If your hard drive is made by Toshiba, try the Hitachi DFT CD Image version of the software

I'm downloading Windows Diagnostic Tool Ver. 1.12 (For IDE/ATA/SATA Hard Drives) and ImageBurn...

"Kathy" wrote:Hahaha! not yap wa' Hol

No it isn't, I also speak French and German as well.