A few days ago, one of my friends' laptops was having some problems. Most of the time, pressing the power button did not turn on the display. And when it did, it booted up to the Windows blue screen.

The concerning thing was that he had no backup. So, my only priority was to get a backup of the important files as soon as possible.

A laptop that wouldn't turn on, a Windows Blue Screen Error, and no backup — here's how I solved it.

To be specific, the Windows Error was:

The Header Checksum For This File Does Not Match The Computed Checksum.

File: windows/system32/boot/winload.exe

In the BIOS, I discovered that the fans weren’t spinning and the CPU temperatures were higher than normal. I assumed it was a thermal throttling issue causing all the problems. So I sat in a cool place and performed the following steps:

1. Flashed a USB using Windows Media Creation Tool.

2. Connected the USB and an external hard drive to the laptop.

3. From the BIOS, booted using the USB.

4. Selected the ‘Repair your computer‘ button on the bottom left.

5. Clicked on Troubleshoot → Command Prompt

6. In the Command Prompt, I first checked the names of the disk volumes using diskpart, then exited it and used the commands xcopy and robocopy to copy selected directories to the external hard drive.

The laptop kept shutting down if it was left on for too long, so I had to copy the files in batches, with extra care.

In the end, after taking the backups, we sent it for repair. Fortunately, the laptop was repaired. Apparently, the issue was with the Power IC, and the fans were clogged with dust. Cleaning them and repairing the IC solved the problem.

What I learnt from this:

1. I was reminded for the 100th time that backups are important.

2. Using cloud storage is probably the best and easiest way these days to avoid losing important data.

3. robocopy is better than xcopy.

In the end, everything worked out, and thankfully none of the original data was lost. But it’s always good to have backups to avoid such last-minute hassles.