Gadgetory

so what you see before you is a relic this is a dell inspiron it has seen some better days it's got a broken hinge heck even the chassis is cracked but that's okay this has been around the world a couple of times it's even been on an Afghanistan military deployment so yeah that's Afghan dirt that you're seeing probably but you've heard me talk about this before this is from my brother who is a retired military veteran and I got basically it handed to me and was like hey it doesn't work anymore but we've got really important pictures we'd like to get off of here so can you please save those and I was like yes I can save those in fact I'm gonna try and do you one better I'm gonna try and save the machine it's not really worth saving but hey they can let there they can let their five-year-old pound away on the keyboard or something MSI brings ultra-thin gaming to life at their new GS 65 stealth the four point nine millimeter bezel 144 Hertz 1080p panel nvidia graphics and 8th gen intel cpus make the new GS 65 self a true powerhouse with a small footprint find out more and how to preorder by following the link in the description below first and foremost we have to understand what the problems are now this is an old T 4400 base Pentium dual core loosely based upon the Core 2 Duo architecture but here's what we're dealing with right here it works in a typical fashion you know when when somebody who's not you know really versed in computers hands you compare with a problem you go what's wrong with it they go it's just not working and you're like well what doesn't work and they go well it doesn't start now that could mean maybe the picture isn't coming up maybe the computer isn't power on in our case it will sit right here loading for the longest time and then what happens is it basically tells us that we have a corrupt boot sector basically it just actually gives you a boot error and like an error code and the whole deal what I love though is the built-in Diagnostics and let me show you this part because I feel like I'm playing an old like a dork turn-based video game that's all text-based that sounds like I'm playing an old-school game man if we go all the way back to like there yeah who remembers who remembers when this was the sound effects you got in games so what this is basically telling me is that it actually detected an error the last time the last time I tried to boot self test self test log contains previous errors that give an error code a message can be can be used by Dell technical support to help diagnose a problem all right we just want to continue yes we're gonna get to now it's testing the optical drive this has an optical drive and a PCMCIA slot and it was a pretty massive slot back there it is right there but yeah this whole giant car that was about that long would slide into that and sock it in and that was actually how you had hot swappable devices in a laptop what's funny about that now is cuz everything's just done through either a Thunderbolt USB 3 type C whatever oh look VGA test where color bars displayed look at that look at that font so we going to board this but I just thought that was an interesting little piece of information to show you that this had actually a built-in diagnostic and it did catch the error the error I caught was actually just previously logged error saying Windows wouldn't boot now this was updated to Windows 10 thank god he actually participated in the free windows upgrade because had this been an old Windows Vista machine or god forbid a Windows ME which I highly doubt I think this was initially an XP machine I think I could be wrong I don't have boot drives or boot disks for any of those operating systems sure I could easily go online and get it but because this is Windows 10 we might actually have a chance of recovering it through my Windows 10 disk right here so we're gonna try this first see this is why I say look it's on Windows 10 here's the problem it'll sit here I'm preparing automatic repair forever it does not move from this point a couple of things this could mean one it could just be a corrupted they're of the hard drive that destroyed the bootloader or it could be a bad hard drive all together I don't know so yeah we just need to make sure Windows doesn't automatically wipe itself which it can do wah wah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah is it going to boot up this we don't want setup though we won't repair because if I do setup that's gonna that's gonna screw us cuz it will wipe the drive so Windows setup 64-bit and we're gonna tell it to repair if it can't repair then it'll do that we'll do it the easy way take the drive out offload the pictures and then go from there so we've been sitting here for a while and it's just not actually loading I'm you got a cursor it's not actually loading a menu so here's what we're going to do we're gonna go ahead and play it safe and we are going to shut this down we're gonna open it up take the hard drive out use one of my hot swap sleds from my Atomos which is just a SATA 2 nap inch drive thing and then we are going to recover the data make sure that's nice and safe and then we'll see if we can get this working again but that is a secondary mission objective primary mission objective is to save the pictures otherwise then you're dealing with an upset sister who's known to get emotional at simple things imagine losing priceless irreplaceable photos literally at the end of all this I'm like what's this it wasn't that's the thing it's like ah now this is the atomos Drive sled for two and a half inch SATA drives it's not meant for computers like the sense we're about to use it but it's nothing more than a hot swap drive that has a sled that's designed to go into the Atomos but this will work with any drive and as you can see it has the slot cuts and slots and all you need there's nothing to actually mount this down so you don't want to lift it up and break it if you've never broken one these tabs these are extremely brittle plastic so you just slide it in like so and then it terminates to a USB 3.0 and this one right here is actually for supplemental power so you have the USB 3.0 and a little bit extra power going through there so we are gonna plug this in right now navigate the extremely unnerving contents of my sister-in-law's hard drive and with these two computers side by side in contrast it's kind of insane given how far we've come in the last nine years in laptop technology so it's actually a partition on this drive right here so we're seeing local disk v and local disk F it's indexing it right now but so far we're not getting any sort of capacity to show up and that worries me a little bit because if this drive is completely corrupted I don't have the tools necessary to extract the contents from it now there are companies and sources out there that you could send a hard drive to and they can recover lost data even from bad sectors I personally don't have the ability to do that so if it ends up going that route today unfortunately I won't be able to show the results of that so the recovery partition showed up but the local disk f is still not and what's interesting is the recovery is half full but what we notice right now is we're sitting here waiting and waiting and waiting but the drive is not actually turning oh wait yes it is something is not right with this drive which we kind of already expected right so we're looking at the performance graph for the drive and you can see it goes up to a hundred percent usage here where I say actually it's active time this drive has probably been completely just it could have been shocked really bad I mean there's all kinds of things that could have happened with this but you see here read speed write speed it's just completely sitting here doing nothing with active time so I'm thinking this drive might unfortunately be unrecoverable by me anyway I feel bad though because I'm trying I want to get these photos off of here but I can't make I'm Eli kind of like a little glimpse of life for a split second there and then stopped that might be why Windows continues to fail to boot because we saw update repair trying write an update repair automatically happens if it sees what two or three failed boots automatically which means this drive could just been shutting down in the middle of the boot process I'm gonna make the call I'm gonna make the call to the sis well unfortunately guys this is a fail video they happen every now and then I love those videos that have the happy ending where everything worked but it's not a total loss because I took the 7200 rpm one terabyte drive which is a bit of an upgrade from her 250 50 gig 450 550 5400 rpm G's numbers hard talking and I went ahead and put that inside of her system and we are now installing Windows 10 which means now at least this will still work hardware wise there's no problem with this so at least there's a silver lining because we were able to get a working computer for her once again but I guess this is a lesson in keeping backups of things that really really matter to you well we need to back up our design elements folder on my computer that has like everything we use anyway guys we're gonna go I wish this had a happy ending unfortunately now my sister gets to experience with data recovery is like when you send it off to a specialist so yeah no idea what that's gonna cost her but she's not too happy lesson learned in backing up your important data so hopefully next time we can have a happy ending not that kind of happy Anna you know what I mean you know and we didn't pay for the happy ending this time around I should have but don't forget those speaking of happy endings we are also doing a huge giveaway right now where I'm giving away a CPU a motherboard memory graphics card cooler all kinds of stuff to give you a huge upgrade to your existing system or to kick your next build off on the right foot check the link in description below if you guys want know more about that and as always we will see you guys in the next one Dover check the link in the description below if you guys don't know about more about the bed load up so I just talked to my sis and Mac hey let's drop the process that's this one yeah play out the keyboard