hard drive has failed
well not yet got a friend working on it, got him backing up everything he can before something happends to it, sucks tho really bad do you guys bring your external hard drives to gigs, at first i didn’t but now since this thing has happened i am afraid to leave anything on my internal hard drive. Like I might just get a 500gb external hd and put windows on it and boot from there.
so pissed makes me hate my dell
Whats it doing that makes you think its failed ? Generally speaking hard drives dont give you any warning that they are about to die, they just die :\
For the paranoid dj who is worried about hard drive failure its possible to actually boot an OS from a thumb drive. With the size of thumb drives nowadays you have more than enough room to install an OS, traktor and all the music you will need to rock on for the rest of your gig.
Hard drive failure is a fact of life, Toshibas do it, Macs do it, Dells do it, doesn’t matter who you buy off they are all about just as susceptible to this damage.
Question: Does booting from the Stick not slow down your operating system?
BTW, personaly i wouldnt boot from an external…its gona be slower
That is what I was implying. It would be considerably slower actually. Even the stick option would make it very slow. I mean, in all fairness for thin clients and all, but they just do not do it for when you are going to use a lot of your computers resources.
well i am thinking its gonna die cause my hard drive stops spinning on boot up, i get the blue screen of death when i try to boot up in safe mode, so I am thinking its about to go.
I check a 200gb hd from dell it was like 230 so I might get that and just keep all my music on my external and just have all my programs on the internal hd.
are you sure its the hdd dying and not something else? BAD memory made me get this before on my old laptop. The symptoms look bad though. But you said you have a DELL? Well, there are great diagnostics tools from dell, they should have come with your laptop, OR you can get them off the net. It will take some time to scan your system for errors (especially the HDD) but you will most probably get some answers 
Better be safe/sure than sorry 
If you would need any kind of technical help, then let me know (worked with this damn computer shit for 17 years now hehe)
aight good looks i got my friend working on it now he is trying to fix it so hopefully it will be fine once he gets done i am just worrying cause i have not backed up all my new music.
You could search for hdd monitor software that can look at the health of your hdd.
Still bluescreens at the start up get me thinking to do a reinstall of your OS?
Please be aware that booting from an external hard drive will not yield the same performance, and if you plan on running any software from there (especially audio) expect an even decreased performance.
If you still decide to go this route, get an eSata drive, so you can get the best performance.
It will slow down the loading that the OS has to do, once everything is loaded into the system memory though its not that big an issue. We are also talking about if a hard drive manages to die mid set, which is very very highly unlikely - so a thumb drive being slow is going to be the least of your worries if this happened.
Carrying around an Esata hard drive in case if a hard drive fails mid set is a little crazy, they are much more expensive and waaaay bigger. Your chances of actually having to ever use a backup drive is soooooooooooo slim.
Bento:
Now that you mentioned it… have you noticed any latency increase in your Dell laptop by using VCI-100, Sound Card (In my case AudioDJ), and a USB drive?
I noticed a big increase in performance and lower latency when I switched to my eSata connector. Although, this was previous to formatting down my laptop and use it exclusively for Traktor and tweaked Vista.
Ive never had a problem with an external hard drive adding latency.
ok well got my laptop back and its still fucking up. Like it just won’t boot up past the windows loading screen.
If you need to still do backing up take the hard drive out of the laptop and put it in an external hard drive enclosure, slap her in a mates computer and back up what you need.
Then put the hard drive back into the computer, go into your bios and set the cd rom drive as the first boot device, put in your OS cd, reboot, follow the prompt, format your hard drive and reinstall your OS.
If your getting to the OS loading screen your hard drive has not failed.
aight cool thats what i might do. really i just need to get all my music off and stuff i can get ableton again.
Be weary of what you back up, make sure to run everything though a virus checker just to be sure your not infecting your new install with something nasty.
yea i got ya i am gonna do that tonight
Good luck with that Keep us posted if you have any troubles and i will help ya out.