Okay, I'm on my sister's Win98 AOL Dial Up PC becase this morning at about 1:30 my Laptop just took a dive.



When I start it up it says, "Cannot Find Operating System" or something to that extent. I serisouly don't know what happened. I tried to get it up in safe mode and succeeded once but now I can't even do that, all I get is that error message.



I also tried booting it up using my XP Pro CD in the CD Drive but it started to do a System Recovery so I let it, then it stoped because there was some kind of error.



There's a weird sound coming from the computer now, it's like a clock ticking very very loudly and it only happends when the computer tries to do something likie start up.



Please don't tell me that my HD is gone, I couldn't take that.

Sounds like the HD went POOP.

Yep, you be needing a new harddrive.

Dude get a Dell.

It's gone, my HDD is gone.

its proper fucked

All the pics, vids, movies, porn, and most importantly, my music.

The hell with the Music.. Save the Pron..

there's weird ways of recovery, I've been told



putting it in the freezer



dropping it a short distance



one guy said he managed to recover data by taking out the hard drive (still plugged in), and rubbing it on carpet with his foot while he typed

It's a Laptop, I'm calling ******* Sony.

Fuggin IDE drives.

is it a vaio?

Just spread Mayonaise on it and eat it..

Cough Cough, just signed for the new HD 3 minutes ago LOL. What a ******* day?

**Cough cough**... Save the prOn..

You can send the drive to a data recovery business. They will remove the platters from the drive, read them on their machines, and burn all of your data to CD's. If you have data on there you cant live without, I would recommend it.



Sometimes the 5" drive drop works on getting the HD functional for a short period of time. Pull it out of your laptop and drop it on a table from about 5" in the air. Sometimes this will unstick them temporarilly. Not highly recommended by the company holding your warranty though...

I know how you feel srce, my "mad cow" HD died on me with over 12Gig of Video, Music, 500+ pics that I already deleted from my digi cam (including fam, my first rx7--RIP--, my MR2, and **** load more.)



I Might have to try the 5" drop. hell. its only a gateway.

Should keep backups on an immobile computer. hard drives have quite a high failure rate, especially in laptops which are usually used in a pretty hostile evironment (hostile for hard drives that is).



Sucks man, it's happened to me a number of times... mostly on my laptops. At work we have so many machines constantly running that we see the failure rate, and sometimes it gets ridiculous. I've had to restore multiple systems simultaneously from backups due to hard drive failures, in the same ******* night. Thats with high end SCSI drives even.



Maybe start burning things to CD/DVD or using tapes.

****! Save the music man!



Laptops never seemed very reliable to me, I mean, all those little parts in such a hot environment...



The best thing to do is let it sit...with the power off of course, sometimes hardware problems fix themselves.

yep, and all the getting knocked around in carrying cases or just walking around the house with it. I noticed I started having more problems once I started using wireless ethernet, I was always taking the laptop out to the garage and it gets jostled around while playing mp3's.. mm, mr. head, meet 5000+ rpm platter.

yep, and all the getting knocked around in carrying cases or just walking around the house with it. I noticed I started having more problems once I started using wireless ethernet, I was always taking the laptop out to the garage and it gets jostled around while playing mp3's.. mm, mr. head, meet 5000+ rpm platter. [/quote]

Yeah I'm really glad I didn't get a laptop for college. Instead I bought an ipaq. https://www.nopistons.com/forums/pub...IR#>/bigok.gif

Well first off, I wanna get the data recovered if it's still there. I don't want to mess with this drive anymore until I find out if somebody can get my stuff off the drive and onto my new 120GIG USB one which if I had ordered it 2 days prior, this **** might now have happened.



The biggest surprise to me is that my sister is letting me use her PC since I'm always uptight about her using my new machine. So, props go out to her.



I'm NOT gonna call Sony or Best Buy (place of purchase, I have a 4 year warranty there, laptop is one year old and Sony's **** ran out in april) becasue I just know that they're going to tell me that it's simply fucked.



So, I got the yellow pages as Scotty suggested and I'm gonna start calling people first thing tomorrow. In the mean time, I'm gonna go start that sucker up again and see if I can get it into safe mode again (worked once).



Thanks for all the suggestions, I'm not really worried about my movies and the other vids and porn, just my Rx7 and Rotary pics and my MP3's and personal info.

if the damage is in the logic board you can buy an identical drive and swap the board. If the damage is internal it needs to be opened (duh) and generally you need a cleanroom environment for this but some have done it out in the open with success. In any case, you will likely need another identical drive if you want to recover the data yourself.

I've messed with desktops plenty before and never had a problem from taking things out and putting things in, but I don't know **** about laptop's, so I'm not gonna touch this thing. I'm gonna look for a pro to do this for me, I'm probably gonna end up paying a lot of money for this **** to get done.

Make sure its plugged in. https://www.nopistons.com/forums/pub...DIR#>/wink.png

https://www.nopistons.com/forums/pub...doublebird.gif





Okay, some good news I think. I got into the BIOS and I can move around in there. So, can I do anything with this, or does it NOT matter that I can get into BIOS.

Kinda matters, not really, bios isnt on hdd.



Im serious make SURE its plugged in.

It's a ******* laptop, what's there to plug in?

the hdd to the.. erm.. laptop board?