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[Docpan]

Let me first just say that It's driving me crazy that I can't play Half Life 2, one of my most anticipated games of the year.

Yesterday I finally got Steam working, and got to play the game. It was great, but I had some unusual framerate dips. I was told that defragmenting would help the problem.

So I left it to defrag. Came back 3 hours later, and it was frozen on ...The Windows loading screen? What the hell? As I said yesterday in another thread, no soft reset method worked, so I had to shut down manually.

Doing that obviously fucked up my harddrive something fierce. It now makes a crazy clicking noise, frantically trying to find the files across the half-defragged hard drive. Trying to defrag again gives an error message every time.

Doom was impending. In a last attempt to evade reformatting, I used the Windows Self-checker tool that's supposed to check the disk for errors and correct them. Results show a mass of "unreadable" sections, then finally an "unexpected error." Well, fuck. My hard drive is in ruins!

So screw it, I said. I get everything set up for the reformat. Get everything ready, and then sit for almost two hours as the hard drive is formatting. It gets to 100 percent, then decides to give me a SYSCFG (that may not be the exact name) error about some driver that can't be removed while in use? WHAT THE FUCK?? I CAN'T EVEN DELETE THIS SHIT?!

So here I am, with a half-fucked up laptop. Steam/Half Life 2 is gone, as I had to do a system restore to two days ago.

I can't defrag it, and apparantly I can't format it either?
I'm fucked, and I need your help. Anybody. I'm desperate here.

I just wanna play my game. =(

 

[Matlock]

Damn, man.

And originally, I thought this thread was about the feds finding your stash of pirated kiddie porn.

 

[belgurdo]

Damn, man.

And originally, I thought this thread was about the feds finding your stash of pirated kiddie porn.

The crash solved that problem for him

 

[Orin GA]

Man, I aint ever defragging my hard drive ever!

 

[Pachinko]

I'd say you need a new hard drive , I had one that made all those horrible sounds and I couldnt' even scan it without getting errors.


If you managed to do a system restore though , it can't all be buggered. Try doing a thorough scandisc where it scans deeper and fixes errors , then do a defrag and finally try reinstalling steam + HL2.

 

[Manabanana]

If you ran OSX then wouldn't have to defrag, then you could enjoy HL2 without all the fuss. OH WAIT! DAMMIT! *sobs*

 

[keiichi]

1. Try using Knoppix as a recovery tool
2. If it's making clicking noises try putting your HD in the freezer .... um.. yeah. google that method. It works.

 

[alejob]

How are you formating?

Boot from a floppy. And format from there if you're not doing it already.

 

[Jim Bowie]

I thought this thread was about... your stash of pirated kiddie porn.

OMG PM PLZ

Spoiler

Jeez, I'm kidding. Sorry about your laptop. If it makes you feel any better, a glass snapple bottle broke all over my iBook once... only it still works perfectly.

 

[luxsol]

2. If it's making clicking noises try putting your HD in the freezer .... um.. yeah. google that method. It works.

LMAO
I put it in "+hard +drive +clicking +freezer" into google and the first site that comes up says "Definitely don't put it in the freezer!"

 

[Manabanana]

From some other forum:
"Actually, there is a good reason why freezing you hard drive works. A lot of times why an old hard drive will fail is the internal parts becoming worn and the heads starting to make actual contact with the platters. Freezing the hard drive for an hour or so will make the metal contract enough so that the heads are lifted back off the platters and your data can be read from it. Of course, once it thaws back out, the heads will crash back on to the platters and kill it some more, so this is only a last chance soution to get important data off the drive."

There are a few success stories, but they all seem to be saying that you should really only do it to pull your last bits of data off before the thing dies. They reccomend wrapping it in a towel then putting that in a freezer bag to keep it from gathering condensation. They also suggest keeping it in the towel while running it to keep it colder longer and to protect it from condensate.