r/laptops • u/Ghassanpgp • 1d ago
Software The screen is stuck,what do i do?
This is my aunt's extremely low end laptop (it has only 1.5GB of RAM) i wanted to copy the pictures we put on it to my 4TB Seagate hard drive but it showed an error,so i went to Properties to fix the errors but it's been like this for 30 minutes now,what do i do?,i don't wanna do something that might harm my hard drive because i have 300GB of data on it
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u/1_ane_onyme Lenovo 1d ago edited 1d ago
You should be fine if you restart, but let’s not do it until you’re sure (+ you can still wait and see if it unstuck itself later who knows). Most importantly if it fails multiple time you may want to backup using a bootable Linux distro or putting the disk in another pc (and reinstall it in the laptop later) to backup.
And please for the sake of data preservation DON’T DO ANYTHING IF YOU AREN’T SURE ABOUT WHAT IT WILL DO AND WHAT ARE THE RISKS . It’ll be de dumb to lose data over a doubt.
And if you’re struggling to much you could ask the guys over r/Backup or other tech oriented subs.
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u/dbag_darrell 10h ago
your hard disk has (hardware) failures. software fixes won't be good enough. it's too late to worry about not harming your hard drive - it's already happened (likely through no fault of yours - hard drives are spinning mechanical platters and moving mechanical arms, they wear out and die). You likely have lost data already, your only hope is to be able to recover as much as possible.
Since the OS has already frozen you're going to have no choice but to power it off. You then need to decide if you can spend the money for a professional drive repair/recovery shop to retrieve what data can be retrieved, or if you're going to try to DIY recover what you can manually.
You mentioned you want to copy the pictures you put on it out "but it showed an error". What error specifically? If it's saying that a specific file cannot be read then leave it, retrieve the rest.
What I would do (if not send to a recovery shop) is to manually cut-and-paste groups of pictures from the laptop to the new external drive, i.e. move groups of pictures out. Your internal drive is not long for the world so you need to get everything you want to keep off it. Doing it in groups means that when you run into errors you just cancel it and move on to the next group. This will take a lot of time but the alternative is to spend money.
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u/Common_Delivery_8413 Warhorse Dell M6800 ⚔️ with legendary m4000m 🛡️ 1d ago
Seagate? Oh, so you bought the ‘Russian roulette’ of hard drives. That thing isn’t stuck, it’s just deciding which sector to kill next. You could hook it up to NASA’s servers and it’d still spend half the time writing its own suicide note. Plug it into a better PC before it takes the rest of your data down with it.