Son of a bitch.

Well, as my real computer was broken a while ago, I got a laptop from my brother to use at home... lo and behold, it breaks, and we give it to CompUSA... two weeks later, we get it back, and from day one, it starts freezing after an hour or so of use to the point where I had to shut it down.

This happened rather infrequently, so it wasn't a big deal, but that time span started getting shorter and shorter until it went a maximum of five minutes going absolutely fine, then bam - instant freezing, forced shutdown, all that bulls**t. Around the time when I could only make it stay on for about 30 seconds, I learned it was a problem with my Radeon 9800 display drivers... and lo and behold, right as I am about to install them, it freezes. Now I can get it to go on for a few seconds, but it's in a very safe-mode looking state, because apparently the program I downloaded got so far as to erase my old drivers before it froze :rolleyes: .

Needless to say, this leaves me screwed. The laptop can f**k itself, really, it's just I made some pretty damn good stuff when I had my two weeks on it, and I want to be able to at very least remove those files from that system.

I could turn it on and then transfer the files to the computer I'm on now. The problem is that it has always frozen when I try to do this. I could of course try to access it downstairs from up here, but it denies me access through the network (how do I get past this?)

The only other way I could think of would be to physically remove the harddrive from the laptop and to connect it somehow to the computer up here, but I have no idea if this is even possible.

Suggestions, ladies?

cant you physically install another card ? maybe i missed something here....but it sounds like the problem i was just having 2 weeks ago cass....i ended up putting in a s**t card to retrieve my files, and then bought another, just so i could work....turns out the warranty was up on the crappy one....go figure...

Doc B...

ps...it turns out the only thing i could fathom that really caused it was when i installed........steam......

Removing the HD is entirely possible, but it's not just going to be able to connect into your PC... You may be able to find some weird-ass convertor, but it might be hard...

What you could try doing is popping in some Linux bootable CD hingy (like Knopix, LiveCD, or something that will boot into linux fromt the CDROM) then try and copy them out from there...

Dunno though.

Monqui's idea is probably the best. You can get a very small Live CD distro from www.damnsmalllinux.org try it out.

If that's not possible, have you tried booting directly into safe mode? AFAIK, in safe mode, most drivers are not loaded. So Windows will probably run your monitor from it's built in drivers (if that's even possible). You can probably copy the files out then.

Worst comes to worst, see if you know someone who has the same brand of laptop with a CD writer, or somesuch storage. You can probably remove the HD from your laptop and plug it into that, then copy as needed. I very much doubt this will work though. I see too many compatibility issues.

Maybe if the video locks up you might still be able to get it to log onto a network and copy files off it that way. Perhaps you could boot an XP cd in Rescue mode, and assuming you know the administrator password, go from there. Or drop the drivers on a burned CD with a startup disk and boot the disk, pop in the CD, update the drivers.

if i knew something about laptops this would be easier :sad:

how much hard drive space is left on this PC?

i have a taboo version of partition magic, you could make a portion of the hard drive special and then reformat the rest.

its a powerful and potentially dangerous program, but a partition could solve your issues.

lastly, if the laptop has an onboard video, use it long enuff to get past this.. uninstall the card you are using.

sorry bud, all my experience lies with desktop PC's, i have 4 of them here and swap HHD's all the time.

you can always purchace a cross-over cable and link the two comps, or do what i used to do.. get two dummy accounts with ICQ and fileswap with it.. works at whatever speed your network card will run :biggrin:

hope this helps..

You can get an adapter that plugs a laptop hard drive into an IDE cable and a power cable, but if it was me, I think I would do the bootable CD option. Even if the OS on it didn't support windows filesharing, you could start an ftp server on your PC and upload to that in a web browser.

Use a different graphics card, or get someone clever to try and anti-b0rk your motherboard and PSU for you :smile: I'm sure you also know other people with laptops- perhaps you can plug your HD into theirs and transfer files onto another HD, writeable CD, or internet...

er . . . are you guys trying to tell him to remove the laptop video card??

Using the HD on any other laptop should work as long as their specs are rather close . . . Something you might want to try, in case it's the laptop's monitor, is hook a monitor to the monitor port on the back (most likely). You can also start directly in safe mode in XP (sorry if it's another version, I don't really remember how) if you goto msconfig via run. it's under the boot tab. that will load no optimized drivers for anything . . . so make sure when you tell it to go into safe mode that you want network support. If it keeps freezing at that point, its not your drivers, they're not loaded.

You can also, just slap a Win boot disc in there (Windows ME is the last boot disc they made, besides the one you can create in 2000,XP) you can just boot the system in dos and copy everything that way. . .

Although, if you can get to msconfig before it freezes, goto the startup tab and deselect all and restart, CompUSA (the most computer illiterate people ever, I swear.) might have put something on there and that program could be fudgin' with your system and making it hang in the background. Basically there's infinite possibilities of what could be wrong, for all I know your ram might not be writing properly or the cooling fan for the system isn't going fast enough, or as you said it could be the video drivers. All I can guarentee you is that if you go into safe mode those drivers will not be loaded. So if it freezes then, then there's something else wrong (obviously)

I hope that helps in some way or another.

Even if the OS on it didn't support windows filesharing, you could start an ftp server on your PC and upload to that in a web browser.

Knoppix probably has the Samba setup on it so you could mount network shared folders and your hard drive, then just copy from one to the other. You might run into problems if your laptop HD is NTFS formatted though, because a lot of precompiled Linux kernels don't have any support for NTFS drives... you'll have to look extra hard to find one or maybe even build a new kernel on another system and burn it from there.
That sounds like a pain.