sealie

There are a couple of questions at the end of this narrative. But my nature is to tell stories. Ask anyone who has met me.

So this morning my primary computer died. Dell latitude D830

Last night it was working fine(ish --it's been a wee bit buggy for a while), but Norton said there possibly suspicious activity was happening and recommended using Norton Power Eraser. I ran it and it found nothing. And everything seemed to be okay. I ran malwarebytes and it found nothing.

This morning windows refused to load, and nothing worked I couldn’t run it in safe mode or return it to a previous working configuration. Just cycled to a blue screen of death for a millisecond (too short to read), tried to load windows, blue screen of flashing death, and took me back to a DOS screen telling me windows wouldn’t load…. Round and round the garden like a teddy bear.

It’s an old computer. I got it in early 2008. And it was running windows XP because I figured it couldn’t handle Windows 8. Yes, I know, but Windows 8 would have cacked it.

But was a virus responsible? Age? Software issue? Is the hard drive all right? Taking it to a specialist is very expensive. So I googled a lot and, subsequently, learnt 1) how to remove a laptop hard drive, 2) you can hook up a hard drive to another laptop -- don’t laugh!learning experience, and 3) SATA/IDE to USB connection via a lot of cables.

So I took myself off to PC World and with the help of a very nice assistant bought a self-contained enclosure which I could put my hard drive in, rather than a bunch of cables.

Long story short. My secondary computer did not recognise the hard drive. It told me that a parameter is missing on one attempt, and two other attempts it simply did not recognise the device.

My three incredibly naïve questions are:
1) Is the hard drive likely to be dead?
2) I now have a shell of a laptop, and apparently, you can buy laptop hard drives and they’re really easy to install! I know, I know – learning experience. So can I buy a new hard drive and install an operating system and use it?
3) Do you think that linux would be a good choice?