Image by pcsiteuk via Flickr
I was in my room for two days, too serious about the laptop I've formatting. It is a black type Dell Inspiron N4030. The said unit is personally owned by my son's school teacher which she send to him for repair.
This was my first time to format a laptop made from Dell. It was pre-installed with Windows 7. So far, I already had previous experiences with other laptop like fujitsu and netbooks like Aspires of different brand and EEE PC. So, in short, I'm a little bit familiar when it comes to laptops.
But this one is a complex one. The trouble about this one comes from a defective fan. It's not functioning anymore. That's the reason why the unit tends to overheat. Maybe the owner was not aware of it. The more she used it often would result to greater damage to hard disk drive, the board or even the processor. We know what are the consequences of not having a fan to cool down the unit. The temperature would surely soar high and prevent the hard disk from reading normally because of the excessive heat.
The bad thing happen, I supposed, because of frequent overheating, the hard disk drive crashes or normally hangs.
So I reformat the unit since, windows 7 could not proceed normally either perform a recovery method. I don't have Windows 7 installer so instead, I use Windows XP SP2. But I read that Windows XP user will get technical support from microsoft until 2014. Anyway, for me Xp is still the best.
If you want to do it yourself, here's what I did. First, In my case, since HDD is not detected under AHCI mode, under Setup (press F2) change AHCI to ATA. Then set CD/DVD drive as first boot priority then proceed with installation using XP. It should automatically boot or just press F8 to be sure.
My first attempt to format the drive failed so I did it over again. This is because the hard disk may have a bad sector and would not push through after a long hours of waiting. So what I did is partitioned the drive into 3 parts avoiding the part that failed most of the time when formatting. I created a partition which has a size of 80 GB since the drive total size is 320 Gb. This is to shorten the time during formatting and installation.
You know what, I found out that it takes a long hours of formatting a 320 GB than 80 GB. Formatting 320 GB under ATA mode will lead to almost 6 to 7 hours of waiting. That's tough! Where the normal takes only 2 hours at most. All in all, I've done formatting in12 hours. Additional 12 hours for googling, downloading and installing the drivers and other programs.
I found out that lately that I've already spent 30 hours for this kind of laptop alone. What a dreadful experience! Although I'm done with it, I observed that even though I did clean install the units, it still hangs and seems there is still a problem inside it which I suspect would be the board or processor due to absorption of excessive heat. So I told the owner to replace the fan as soon as possible or as budget allows. This is to prevent major damage to the unit.
