"computer techs" that give the rest of us a bad name...

So early last week one of my co-workers, B, comes up to me and wants to know if I have a moment. She wants to run a computer problem by me for a second opinion, to help her sister out. Sure. Talk is cheap, so since we're both on break I start asking for details.

B tells me her sister has a laptop that is her life-line to the world. She takes online classes while desperately looking for work, and she can't do either without a working computer, so B is trying to help her get the laptop fixed as soon as possible, without it being too expensive, since it's refusing to boot. The sister is on a borrowed netbook for now, so she can get her classes done, but that is obviously not a good long term solution.

Instead of booting the laptop goes to a black screen with white writing that says, "A disk read error has occurred; press Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart". When you press Ctrl-Alt-Delete, the laptop restarts back to the exact same error message, and stays in that loop until you cut the power.

B is one of our customer service agents. She is not a computer whiz by any stretch at all, but she does know all the basics of how they work simply because she has to know that in order to do her job, and that's how she got involved in this laptop situation to begin with. Her sister asked her to come with to meet with a computer tech she found via Craig's List, who promised to charge only a meager $75 to diagnose and fix any computer problem. The sister apparently has about as much computer knowledge as Homer Simpson's grandpa, and she wanted B to come with and make sure she wasn't being scammed by someone trying to take advantage of her desperate need for a working laptop. (So while the sister might be ignorant, she obviously isn't stupid.)

They arrived, with the laptop, powered it on, and the tech looked at the black screen with the short error message and the reboot loop, and then declared that the problem was due to a conflict between Norton 360 and Windows, and they needed to do a repair install, and he'd be happy to sell her the recovery disks.

That's where I interrupted B with a "Please tell me she didn't pay him...!"

B shook her head and scoffed. "I got us out of there before they tried to charge us for that kind of crap. I mean, I'm not an expert, but I thought that message meant the hard drive is bad?"

The laptop is on the floor behind me as I type, and failing a disk diagnostic test more spectacularly than I've ever seen a hard drive fail. I doubt I'll even be able to get any data off of this thing. So when I see B again tomorrow I get to tell her that the good news is that she was right. The bad news is, her unemployed sister will need to spend some cash on a new hard drive and a couple of Toshiba restore disks.

 

You wouldn't happen to have a copy of Spinrite 6 right?

It's helped me out. Well worth $80.

Friend had a Unmountable boot volume and chkdsk failed on it and it fixed the issue so my friend could get his data back.

 

I don't have Spinrite, but do I have lots of Linux Live CDs. One of my Ubuntu disks was able to mount the hard drive long enough that I can get everything in the Vista User folder to an external drive. I hope. Crossing my fingers and begging it not to crash until the back-up is done...! :banghead

 

Good luck!

 

If you can get the folders saved, you can hit I believe F12 at boot and it will ask to recover.

I would first try taking out CMOS if you can easily find it, taking out battery, disconnect power and hold the power button down and hold for 30-45 seconds. It may reset itself..... My old Compaq did that and that is why they gave it to me, I had it running within 20 minutes.

Or /fixboot /fixmbr may solve the woes.

 

On Toshiba laptops, F12 brings up the boot device menu and 0 activates the recovery partition. Or it would, if the hard drive could do it. It mounts, briefly, but unmounts itself again far too soon... so no, the backup didn't get done. The laptop boots off of any liveCD I have as long as the hard drive is out, while the drive itself fails in various enclosures and docks, so this hard drive is officially headed for the big electronics department in the sky by now. Any time a component fails more than one diagnostic test, I tend to give up on it.

All I promised to do was find out how to get this thing up and running again.. new cheap hard drive should do it. It booted off of my spare drive when it was plugged in, but I'm not parting with that one.

 

Thats kind of weird, a co worker of mine asked me to look at her PC , she described the same problem and error message your friend got Mimsy.
Naturally my first thought is HDD. I ran Disk tests and it came back no errors, ran another test with same results.
Thought that a little odd but oh well, it didn't give the message every time, only a couple, so I got it to boot and started exploring.
I found 3 different security suits and the process list on XP SP3 was 76 items on idle from start up.
So I started cleaning up.
Uninstalled a load of garbage.
Ran Ccleaner.
Once cleaned up I install Avast, Super Anti spy and Malware bytes.
Avast found and removed 8 items.
Mbam found and removed 149
Super Anti found and removed 872

Once this was all finished I re-ran them all to find nothing.
PC is running fine, I restarted it several times and left it running for several hours, put some pressure on it and browsed internet.

All seems fine now.
I will be telling her to back everything up because I'm still not 100% convinced the HDD is ok.
So we'll see how it goes.

Now, last week she took it to local shop, they not only gave it back to her in this condition but charged her $85 and told her it was a conflict between her PCI 56k modem and ethernet. So they removed her modem, handed it back to her and took her money.

I found that shocking that they didn't even mention any of the other problems that I found within minutes of booting it up.

It seems to me that those with a "Shop" can charge and tell people anything they want and get away with it, personally I couldn't do that and still sleep at night.

 

Wow, Mimsy.. I'm glad that B got herself and her sister out before they got swindeled.

 

LOL, Craig's List? That place is creepy.:eek I'd rather go by 'word of mouth'.

 

I agree.. so many shady dealings there.

 

A lot of shops can't or wont spend the time repairing malware when the customers complient is something else. It boils down to the customer invariably stating, i didn't request that cleanup, there for not paying for it. Seen it happen in our shop time after time, despite a cleanup needing done, it boils down to you can't stay in business doing extra work and not getting paid, and most customers wont specifialy bring in an infected machine unless it stops working. Something like a disk error they wont pay for any sort of spyware removal they just say fix the disk error. Sad but true.

 

Yea sad thing is so many open computer "shops" and really have no right to be in the business. So easy to be shady when repairing computers.

 

I have a Toshiba repair disk. PM me if you need it.

 

I knew they would get mentioned as soon as I saw the title of the thread.

 

I offer work on Craigslist and i do a $50 flat rate plus parts if needed. I send alot of people home happy with there computers so don't down CL not everyone is bad on there.

Glad tho to hear B had the help she needed.

 

Maybe not, but enough there do tend to be like that.

 

The only reason I mentioned Craigs List was as an explanation for why B was going with her sister to check the guy out. I'm sure there are lots of good techs posting on Craigs List to get work come in their way. This guy just wasn't one of the honest ones.

The drive is officially dead, by the way. Doesn't even try to spin up no matter what I connect it to, and the manufacturer's diagnostic tool sees that something is connected, but has no idea what it is.

I'm returning the laptop tomorrow, with some advice on where to get a new drive.