So, I'm new to the PC repair business. I've been learning a lot from the time I spend doing similiar task at work. One of my roomate's friends hard drive crashed. One of her friends tried to fix it by reformatting and re-installing windows. It turns out he installed two copies of windows on this 80GB HD. He could never get it to load.
I did not have to back up her data because her previous computer guru wiped out everything from trying to fix it so many times. I couldn't even open it in Knoppix it kept saying it failed to recognize it. I couldn't change the format either.
I did not have a Floppy handy for a boot disc.
I took my shot at it last night and it took me several hours to get it working (I'd say about 5 hours). I'd boot it up and it went to the "Error operating system failed to load". So I restarted several times and checked the BIOS. The BIOS found the hard drive and had recognized it (so that wasn't the problem). So, I tried to boot it with the Alienware XP CD. Everytime it finished loading all the drivers in and got to the "Loading Windows XP" screen it would shut off the laptop. I tried this several times and sometimes got to the "Select a partition" screen. As soon as I touched an arrow key it would shut down.
I decided I wasn't getting very far after trying this like 100 times. So, I turned to Knoppix. I tried about 14 times and Knoppix would fail to boot! I gave it some time to cool off and was able to get into Knoppix. Knoppix crashed about three times and just froze up. The last time I tried it I was able to open up terminal and start shredding the hard drive. I re-wrote the entire hard drive 100 times with 0's. I then reformatted it to NTFS. I put the Alienware CD back in and it finished loading all the Windows drivers and files and I'm currently setting it up.
How much should I charge for this procedure? I am fairly new to this, but I'm sick of taking the bus and I need money to go to my car clutch fund.
