Technology, Computers and Smartphones

[Deleted]

So my computer died. I was minding my own business reading Google news last night and bam, computer shut down and gave me the error, "vgaoem.fon file missing or corrupted" and suggested a reboot from the Windows XP CD. So I rummaged around in my closet and miraculously the Windows XP CD had survived two years and a move with a bunch of other random stuff I had thrown into a Best Buy bag. I tried to reboot from the CD and managed to get a funky version of Windows which wouldn't connect me to the Internet. I tried to reinstall again and reformat the hard drive only to get error messages that certain files were missing from the CD. My best guess is that the harddrive got corrupted, because that's the only way I can account for the failure of the OS, then the CD and the network card. So after spending several hours wrestling with the problem, I finally gave up the ghost and went and bought a new computer at Best Buy. It was fairly cheap because I still have my LCD monitor and speakers fromm Dell, and the ergonomic keyboard and wireless mouse I had just splurged on with my new loan money, so I just bought a new tower. It's an HP. It's name is Steve McQueen.

Now my question is: I'm throwing out the old computer. However, I don't want to just do that and have someone find it in the trash and be somehow able to get my old info off it. So is there something like the Geek Squad could do, disassemble or scramble the hard drive before I junk it?

[laconicchick]

My dad smashes the hard drives, but I don't think that's the recommended method. Or, for all I know, it could be.

[topher]

Take a magnet and run it over the hard drive and then smash it to pieces. The smashing sure relieves stress after fighting with the computer.

[Deleted]

Okay, but how do I get the hard drive out of the tower?

[topher]

You just have to remove some screws.

[Deleted]

Do you have photos of where to unscrew and what a hard drive looks like? I've never disassembled a computer before.

[laconicchick]

I have an external hard drive that my parents didn't need anymore. I want to back up my laptop to it. When I got the laptop in December, I put all the stuff from old floppy disks and my old computer onto the external hard drive so I could move it to the laptop. Sometime during that process, something funky happened to the external hard drive. There are a bunch of empty folders and weird files with names made up of symbols and those square boxes. I can't delete them or do anything else with them; it says "cannot read from the source file or disk." Even the name of the drive is corrupted somehow; it's a bunch of symbols (a 1/2 sign and an E accent aigu and some squares) followed by (E:).

So my question is: can I format the drive somehow? Or can I do something else to fix it? The weird corrupty files don't seem to have harmed anything so far, but I don't want to take that risk. And does anyone know how that could have happened?

ETA: Okay, if I look in the My Computer window, it looks like I can format it -- but do I want to? And is there anything I should know about doing that?

(And as a side note: my sister has a brand new laptop with a larger hard drive, more RAM and a dual-core processor. I am so jealous! My baby is only 8 months old!)

[topher]

poorfrances said:

Do you have photos of where to unscrew and what a hard drive looks like? I've never disassembled a computer before.

Just start unscrewing from the bracket holding the drive to the case. That's the best part of destruction. I am guessing you are not needing anything else inside the computer.

[Deleted]

In the back where the fan is?

[alpierce]

The hard drive is a flat rectangular metal box with a flat ribbon cable coming out of the back and a 4 lead power connection. It is usually mounted in the front of a standard mini-tower case, but in a desktop version it could be elsewhere. Common manufaturers are maxtor and Western Digital (WD)