Two things I learnt last Monday

[Aard Vark]

On Monday afternoon last week I found out you should never put your mobile phone on the key board of your lap top.
Because if said phone rinngs while on your keyboard your lap top hard drive is stuffed.

You may be asking why I left my mobile on the key board of the lap top. That is simplely answered. My 14 y/o wanted to move my Suzuki 4X4 so he could get the mower out of the shed.
He's done this a thousand times before except this time he ran strait into a tree writing off the front end.

Hearing loud thud I dropped the phone and went to see what was happening. Phone rings out while I'm outside and that was the end of the hard drive.

Now I have a week's woth of posts read and I have to buy a new lap top now.

[The Hen]

Wow. Bummer Aardy. I am surprised there wasnt a third thing gone wrong there.

Do yourself a favour though, don't worry about reading the "Here you go Lo" thread. it isn't worth it.

[Sean]

Do yourself a favour though, don't worry about reading the "Here you go Lo" thread. it isn't worth it.

...nothing to do with the thread's creator of course...

Sorry to hear that Aardy. I guess fate thought you were having things too easy lately...

Before you run out to buy a new laptop explore another couple of options. The phone may well have just erased some important files so reinstalling windows may fix it (and you wouldn't lose any data). Failing that, re-formatting the drive and re-installing windows is an option (but you would lose data).
TBH the only way I could think of for a phone to affect the drive is through magnetism and as a phone does not have anywhere near enough to affect a drive in normal circumstances I would suspect that your drive was faulty to begin with. Even with this worst case scenario you're only shelling out for a new drive rather than a laptop.


I'm sure your son has told you how badly laptops and mobiles interfere with the steering on Suzuki 4x4s though...

Good luck with it mate!

[loCAtek]

Tech is fickle Aardy, have faith in yourself.

[Aard Vark]

Hen I get home and put on a load of washing.
Bloody Washer spat the dummy with a cloud of smoke and a few sparks. I will open it up tomorrow might be a snake stuck in the gears

So you had to mention the third thing

[The Hen]

Sorry Aardy.

[Aard Vark]

All good just makes the day interesting.

[The Hen]

I'm just off for my 'interesting' day. The Treasuer is bringing in the local budget. Should be a riot ...

[Aard Vark]

You win I have to mow the back yard

[The Hen]

Fingers crossed that you have better luck with your mower than we do with ours.

[Aard Vark]

I did, no problems with the mowing. Running out of fuel is bad luck it is good management. I didn't want to mow down there anyway.

[loCAtek]

Good, bad or MAY be luck;

Maybe (Taoist story)

There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. "Such bad luck," they said sympathetically.

"Maybe," the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. "How wonderful," the neighbors exclaimed.

"Maybe," replied the old man. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. "Maybe," answered the farmer. The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. "Maybe," said the farmer.

May you have May

[Aard Vark]

Reminded me of the story of the water woman with the cracked water pot.
Every morning she would carry two water pots on a yoke across her sholders.
On the long walk back to her house the craked pot would drip water all the way. only leaving only half the water inside.
The old woman's friend asked her why she never replaced the craked pot.
The woman said " As I have aged the crack has got bigger so my loads have become less as my strength has fadded.
And each day as a I walk home the pot has watered the wild flowers on the side of the road. So I walk home with the beutifull fragrance of flowers.
If I had replaced the pot my load would be to much and the flowers wouldn't grow."

While I was down the back I found about 20 water mellons growing, many more pumpkins, Sour-sops and tomartos, even some paw paw trees. Anything I used to feed the pigs the flood water washed all the seeds out of the old pig pen and they are growing extreemly well.
So where I haven't mowed I have a veggy garden. All is good

Now I have a problem of what to do with all this fruit and vegg ?

[Lord Jim]

might be a snake stuck in the gears

Man, I just hate it when that happens....

[Aard Vark]

Your not the only one.

And the washer I still don't know what gave it the hissy, mind you I haven't tryed to start it either.

[oldr_n_wsr]

I am an EE and I can't think of any electrical reason for a cell phone to erase/ruin a hard drive.
I will ask around though.
Hard to think that this is the first time this happened (or that we've heard about it) if hard drives were susceptable to cell phone transmission.

[Aard Vark]

If you can find out more I would love to know. I am just putting two and two together here. I was told never put the mobile on the lap top because of hard drive damage, so I guessed that is what happened as it did ring and it was onthe key board and now it doesn't work.

May be the hitting with a hammer while yelling at the screen didn't help but I am sure that it must be something else.

[oldr_n_wsr]

Does it boot up at all?

I will check around with the EE's, IT's and CE's I know.

[Aard Vark]

Nope not a wink. But it makes a scraping noise and then has a rattle then back to the scratching sound.

Hope you can find something would be good to have my lap top back.

[oldr_n_wsr]

Checked with a few EE's and ET's (one of each work in the mobile phone division of Motorola and the EE is an antennae expert) and both said they have never heard of this problem and that essentially the cell phone is not the cause. More likely the drive was on it's way out (bearing grinding sound) and "perhaps" the shock of the phone dropping on the case and/or putting the laptop down rather abruptly sent it over the edge.

My advice is to get a new hard drive (should be under $100). Then all you need is the OS disk which you either should have gotten when you bought it or you will need to contact the manuf to have them send it to you. Your data is most likely gone but you can try making the "dead" drive a slave on a working computer and see if anything is retrievable. You'll probably have to use a desktop computer for that as I don't think laptops support slave drives.