Upgrading & Fixing Laptops DUMmIES

Closing the Operating Room ........................................................................

The machine’s lights and LCD come to life and you hear the hard drive spin-

ning, but the operating system doesn’t load. Several possible reasons exist.

The hard drive’s boot or “system” tracks have been corrupted. This

could be a harbinger of a failing disk drive, exposure to a magnetic field,

or the result of an improper machine shutdown (such as a sudden cutoff

of power).

You may be able to reinstall the system tracks or the entire operating

system from an emergency recovery CD or disk. Such a disk may be pro-

vided by your laptop’s manufacturer or created using a system utility

program such as Norton SystemWorks.

You have a floppy disk in the drive, and the laptop’s BIOS is set to

attempt to boot from the floppy before trying the hard drive.Unless

you have a good reason to do otherwise, you should change the BIOS

setting so it seeks to boot first from the hard drive. It should go to the

floppy disk as its second or third choice, after also trying to boot from

a CD.

One reason you don’t want your laptop booting from the floppy disk

drive is that floppies are easy carriers of computer viruses from one

machine to another. Another is to prevent a dead start if the floppy disk

drive contains data but not the operating system’s boot tracks.

You ran out of space.You should regularly check the dipstick on your

hard drive, but in case you miss the approaching overstuffed disk, here’s

the most common on-screen warning sign: Insufficient disk space.

Bet you could figure this one out, right? First thing, deal with the imme-

diate problem. If you’re trying to save work in progress, try to store it

somewhere else temporarily: on an external hard drive, across the net-

work to another machine’s hard drive, on a floppy disk, or to a CD-R.

Here’s the way to use the facilities built into Windows to clear up space on

your drive:

1. Double-click My Computer and highlight the name of the internal disk
   drive of your laptop.


2. Under Windows XP, maximize the Details panel on the left side of the
   My Computer display.
   There you see the drive’s name, type of file system used on the drive,
   available free space, and total size. You can also see a graphical version

40 Part II: Explaining What Could Possibly Go Wrong