This is quite ironic, that the first real post on my blog is a story about a near disaster ... ah well, that makes the most interesting reading, eh? And that's what I'm aiming to talk about in this pseudo-tech blog - how to fix problems with your compaq 6515b. Now, I know that this story isn't particularly specific to that exact notebook model - but that's the one I own, so that's how my story s will be written. If you own a 6515b laptop, then follow along ... maybe I can save you some headaches, answer some questions, or just give you some tips about some cool software.
Ok, here's my very sad, but happy ending story. It takes place over 24 hours.
So, yesterday the power was out most of the day, which is not unusual. I am a Canadian, currently living in a beach town on the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua. (it's the best home office I've ever had, by the way). Although it's a lovely country, if you live here you need to accept that the infrastructure is still third world quality. By now, we are quite used to the frequent power outages, so I have a ups which will last ~6hrs. This will power my wireless internet radio, router, and laptop. So everything was working fine, and I was being productive.
Then the ups died ... at which point I continued to work without internet until my laptop died ... which was fine. This just meant I would get go wander around town and visit people earlier rather than later. Although I wasn't happy my laptop, because lately it's only been lasting on battery for about a ½ hour. The battery seems to be getting worse and worse - this might warrant another post another day.
Anyway, it powered down, but I didn’t close the laptop right away. And then I noticed that it actually did a reboot, so now it is back on, and is running with the battery level showing zero. I've been having some problems with hibernate lately - as far as I can tell, I may be too low on disc space, so the laptop hibernates, then crashes, because the next thing I know it's rebooted itself and stays powered on.
In any event, my laptop is back on - albeit operating on zero battery power. "Well great!!" I think. Maybe my battery is fine, I just have to try and reset the alarms, or battery level detector or something, and I’ll get normal battery life again. Anyway, I continued to work for almost another hour. Sadly, I forgot that it wasn’t going to be able to do a software shutdown – "ker-clunk" - now it's powered down for real.
But that's ok, because it's supper time anyway, so I put on my flip-flops and headed out. Part-way through the baseball game - oh, 2 things about San Juan Del Sur - 1) generators, and 2) Nicaraguans *love* baseball - the power came back on, and everyone cheered. (Seriously, the whole town does an ‘awww’ when the power goes out, and a cheer when it comes back on).
So I finished supper, and came back to get a few more hours of work in. I turned everything back on – and my poor little compaq 6515b says 'ow, that last power down hurt', and it shows me the black screen with a bunch of start up options : ‘reboot to safe mode’, ‘last known good configuration’ etc. So I try every option, and the thing is not going to reboot. We're in an infinite loop.
Ok, I try my XP cd - oh right, it's not bootable. Damn, I have to make a boot disk. And the only spare machine I have is a vista machine. That whole process took a little while - but again, perhaps that can be another post another day. So I pretty much have it figured out by the time I go to bed. First thing the next morning I get up, get everything ready, download some freeware to create the bootable install cd, and I burn it. Great. I put it in – the compaq boots up - yay!
But now I’m on the ‘repair or reinstall Windows’ screen. Decision time. I try repair – it goes back to the infinite loop screen from last night. I try the repair console – oh, it only sees my recovery drive D:, it doesn’t give me the option to choose C:. I go into the recovery console anyway. So it seems that I can 'cd C:' and get to the C: drive. But I try to do a 'dir' ... ooooh - bad. It won’t list files, says there’s an error. This is very sad news.
Let's try bootcfg – OH DRAG - this message looks really quite bad. ‘failed to successfully scan disks for windows installations’. By the way, I had already done hours of bios disk and memory checks the night before, both checked out ok at that point.
So, my options now are to reformat and reinstall, because it can’t find an installation to repair, or wait until I can find someone to try and recover the data from my drive. The thing is, I really need to get this going today, because I have a deadline that I'm late on. So getting a working laptop was priority.
So by all means we're not going to format. But I still do some searching on how to get my compaq 6515b booting up again. At the same time, I'm now trying to figure out if installing xp on my external backup drive will let me run with that as my boot/working disc. It should, but that would be painful. And I’d have to setup my dev environment all over again, and then I’d have to go find someone to recover my data, and getting xdebug working was really quite tricky, and oh ya, what to do about the public/private keys for my ssh accounts ... I'm going to be locked out. Super drag. Ow ow ow.
Ok, I've gone back to the recovery console, and I'm sitting at the C: promt, which seems to run programs, but just won't list any files. I finally try chkdsk /r (although I thought my bios disk check had already done this) – this takes 2 hours. BUT!!! aaaa ... YAY! It says it fixed (some) things!! … and now 'dir' gives me a listing!!!! I think there is hope!
So I continue on, and do a chkdsk /p (which is another ½ hour). Then I do a fixboot (success). Then I take out the boot cd, and reboot. The reboot took like 15 mins, so it still wasn’t a sure thing yet … but yay!!! Windows rebooted! Files all still there! Ow. That was scary. And annoying. I do have all my website work svn’ed, but I’ve got a bunch of stuff that is not recently backed up ... well, it is now.
Ok, everyone is happy, my little compaq 6515b is happy, I haven't lost a months worth of stats, ideas and screenshots. All is good in sunny vacation town.
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