Broke disk with KillDisk, now unable to boot.

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MikeTheMK

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I found my old eMachines laptop with Windows XP on it. About 10 years ago when I was a kid, I managed to get it highly infected... I asked a guy for help and he said KillDisk would do the trick, only did it destroy my hard drive. Now, when trying to boot, it gives me this message (Doing my best to translate):

"Windows didn't start because of a disk hardware problem. The chosen disk can't be read from. Check the startup path and the disk's activity."

The laptop is bad and old, why do I want to get it working again? I'd like to see and perhaps transfer my old files from it, reset it to the factory settings and give it to my little sister who only uses social media like Facebook etc.. I think she'd love it.

Thanks in advance,
Mike
 
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As D_Know_WD said, the disk is most likely wiped by KillDisk so your chances of getting any files back are slim. I'm surprised it even says anything about Windows, to be honest - I'd expect it to say "Operating system not found" or something similar if KillDisk has done its job properly.

If you really want to get it working again as a lightweight web browsing machine (assuming the disk isn't faulty), your best bet is to install an easy Linux distribution like Ubuntu or Mint. It'll be faster than Windows on the old hardware and a lot more secure than running Windows XP - I would strongly recommend against using XP on anything these days because it's had no security patches for two years.
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D_Know_WD

D_Know_WD

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Hi there MikeTheMK,

That is really unpleasant.

Unfortunately, you may not be able to recover the data due to the following reasons:
- As far as I am aware of, this tool wipes the data stored on the drive and makes it unrecoverable.
- As the drive is 10 years old, there's a chance that it is physically damaged.

I believe you can attach the drive to another computer, as a secondary one either externally via SATA to USB adapter or internally with SATA & power cables, and see if you will be able to access the drive. Yet again, even if the drive is working just fine, I think that this tool has wiped the data.

Let me know in case you have some more questions,
D_Know_WD :)
 
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molletts

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As D_Know_WD said, the disk is most likely wiped by KillDisk so your chances of getting any files back are slim. I'm surprised it even says anything about Windows, to be honest - I'd expect it to say "Operating system not found" or something similar if KillDisk has done its job properly.

If you really want to get it working again as a lightweight web browsing machine (assuming the disk isn't faulty), your best bet is to install an easy Linux distribution like Ubuntu or Mint. It'll be faster than Windows on the old hardware and a lot more secure than running Windows XP - I would strongly recommend against using XP on anything these days because it's had no security patches for two years.
 
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MikeTheMK

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Hi,

Thanks for the answer, was kind of expected. I wouldn't go inserting the disk to my current PC as it was, as I said, highly infected due to the lack of my knowledge. One more question though: if someone were to have a hard disk with a completely different OS in it, would the laptop boot and work properly with it? My grandfather found a pretty old laptop a few months ago. I cannot remember the OS on it, but it surely wasn't Windows.

Thanks again and sorry for not including this in the main post.
Regards,
Mike
 
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MikeTheMK

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Hello,

Thanks for the answer. How would I go with installing Ubuntu, for example? Now that I look at the laptop, it has no disk drive in it.

Thanks,
Mike
 
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D_Know_WD

D_Know_WD

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Most probably, the HDD wouldn't infect your system, as it is most probably completely wiped.
Anyway, regarding your OS question, I would say that you will most probably get blue screen. The reason for that is that other OS was installed on a machine with completely different hardware.

If we assume that the drive is in a healthy state, you could consider molletts suggestion.
If there is something wrong with the drive, you can just grab a small HDD.

Cheers,
D_KNow_WD
 
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MikeTheMK

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Alright. Thank you so much for the answers, I'll be waiting for a response from molletts then. I just thought about my even older PC, I'd say 14 years old now, that had Windows XP on it. I might still have it somewhere... Inserting the HDD in it wouldn't mind me at all, if it even fits anywhere. I'm keeping my eyes open for it!

Thank you,
Mike
 
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molletts

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If it is able to boot from USB (I don't know quite how old the laptop is but most systems from the last 12-15 years can boot from USB) then you could either use a USB DVD drive or it should be possible to make a bootable USB key with the installation files on.

It would be worth running some diagnostics on the hard drive first - a bootable USB device would be needed for that too. The simplest way would be to go to the hard drive manufacturer's website and download their bootable diagnostics. There should be instructions for making a bootable USB key. The hard disk manufacturers have "reshuffled" a bit in recent years. If it's an IBM or Hitachi drive (TravelStar), WD is the place to go; Maxtor and Samsung drives are now supported by Seagate. (Quantum became part of Maxtor but surely it's not that old...) Google will find the right place, anyway :)

Hope this helps,
Stephen
 
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MikeTheMK

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Thank you for the instructions. I will try to make something happen once I get some free time, I will keep you updated.

Best regards,
Mike
 
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MikeTheMK

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@molletts @D_Know_WD Hello! I got the laptop working again! Sorry it's been ages since my last message, was really busy moving. I managed to hook up the hard drive on my old computer and it was working, so I formatted it and installed a new OS via usb. Thanks guys, sorry again for not posting. Hope you have a nice day! :)
 
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