Help: I killed a laptop

V

Verbal Kint

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 18, 2005
Messages
75
I broke an employees laptop and I need some help. I was ghosting their laptop and I noticed I picked the wrong image from our ghost server so I turned it off. This must have killed the partition because now when I boot from bootable ghost CD or even windows xp CD it will hang and screen will turn black almost right aware after reading from the CD. I wanted to boot using a win98 boot disk to fdisk but this laptop doesn't have a floppy. I was trying to research how to make a usb key bootable so I can fdisk but I can't find any info. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
 
Download GParted or PartedMagic and wipe the drive clean. However, I don't see how ruining the partition would affect the boot order. That's controlled by the BIOS.

Assuming you have Ghost Corporate, you can also make a bootable CD and put gdisk on it. Fdisk lacks functionality, where as gdisk is very useful.
 
DaconFrost is right ruining the partition info shouldn't cause any issues with booting from a CD. Something else is happening or your doing something wrong.
If you have nero on another computer you can use it to create a bootable cd from a win98 boot disk. If you do this and the system still has issues with booting from this disk than I would guess the CD drive went bad or something.
 
Describe more about how/when it hangs.

I've killed over 50 PC's in the middle of ghosting, and have re-started a ghost process again without issue. How easy can you swap another hard drive in this laptop to test if it's a HD issue? That's what I would try.
 
For some reason, no idea why, I laughed my head off at the title....

That said, more info would help. Like others said: your hard drive won't affect the boot order. You can use about any partitioning tool to re-create the partition, then just re-image it again.
 
Sorry everyone I will be a little more specific.

- I have put another hard drive in the killed laptop and it works fine.
- When I put in my network ghost CD in it will start like it normally does with some writing on the top of the screen saying "preparing ghost etc" but then the screen just turns black
- When I put in my copy Windows XP professional in it started out like it normally would. I get a message on the screen "press any key to boot from cd". Once I press a key I get the message on top "setup is inspecting your hardware configuration". Then the screen will turn black and the ROM drive will stop spinning.
- I have put the HD into another working laptop just to rule out any hardware issues with the PC that I killed and the same thing happens. This tell me that something is definitely wrong with the HD.

Do you think the HD is dead?
 
It certianly looks that way doesn't it. If it's under warrenty who cares...

You could try to get creative on Google to find if that's happened to others but if it's under warrenty I wouldn't care, get the drive swapped out and roll out.
 
Just an FYI in case anyone else runs into this.

I managed to fix the problem. I used Hirens boot CD v9.6. Once I booted with this I used partition magic pro to blow away the existing partition and created a new partition and formated it with FAT32 file system. Now when I boot using my ghost or windows CD it works normally.
 
wow so it was a borked patition... What version of Ghost are you using? I've used 7.5/8.6 now 11.0 and I don't have this problem when I stop in the middle of a ghosting...
 
If I were you I would still run the manufactures hard drive diagnostics to make sure there wasn't an issue with the drive. Better to be safe than have to deal with employee when drive dies in a week.
 
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