Help-Laptop won't boot past opening screen

Bettingmad

My DD has a Lenovo 3000 N200 series lap top and this morning tried to start it up however it goes to the opening Lenovo screen with the Pheonix logo on the bottom right of the screen and hangs there not going any further.
The hard drive icon above the keyboard flashes momentarily but then stops. I can't even enter the Bios set up screen to select boot from CD, any help will be greatly appreciated.

Browntoa

sounds like either the Hard drives failed or its a motherboard fault

Bettingmad

Browntoa wrote: »

sounds like either the Hard drives failed or its a motherboard fault

Is there anything I can do?

kwikbreaks

or memory.

Given that it is a laptop then to my mind it's beyond any help you are likely to get on a forum. Is it still under warranty?

===
Actually there are a couple of last ditch things you could try -
take out the hard drive and see what happens
if there are two memory sticks try taking out one and trying it and then alternate it with the other and try

I don't expect either suggestion to help a lot but obviously if it gets further with the drive removed it points to that and the same with each memory stick

Bettingmad

Okay I have disconnected the hard drive and can now get into the bios menu, I guess I have a faulty hard drive, so my next question being is there any way of recovering the many files DD has on her hard drive. The lap top did not come with any restore disks so do I have to buy a new hard drive and operating system?

closed

It depends if it's spinning - is it a travelstar, and does it make an unusual clicking sound?

You could try it in a usb caddy.

You can use any operating system disk of the same type, providing you have the windows COA sticker on the laptop, with serial no.

Bettingmad

closed wrote: »

It depends if it's spinning - is it a travelstar, and does it make an unusual clicking sound?

You could try it in a usb caddy.

You can use any operating system disk of the same type, providing you have the windows COA sticker on the laptop, with serial no.

No its a Hitachi drive and it doesn't make any noises at all, excuse my ignorance but what is the Windows COA sticker and where do I find it?

closed

Hitachi/IBM travelstar - not the most reliable drives. Stick it back in the laptop, see if it works, if not, try a usb - 2.5" caddy



Lenovo may send you out a DVD/CD if you pester them, and if it's not that old you might get a new HD too.

Bettingmad

Okay I have had a little bit of time to pla as it wouldnt load othery with Laptop, I have burnt off a Vista recovery disk in an attempt to repair(I have changed the boot sequence)however it will not load recovery disk with the hard drive in, it will load the recovery disk with the hard drive out which is in itself useless.

I am managing to access web on laptop after I created a ubuntu live cd and booted it of cd drive again with hard drive out as it wouldnt load with it in.

Anyone with any ideas as to why the recovery disk will only load with hard drive out and how I get around this?

At least I have now isolated the problem to the hard drive, is replacing the hard drive the only option in this scenario?

thanks

closed

It will be down to the boot sequence, try pressing F12 at boot, if that doesn't work look for a bios settting relating to startup device menu

Which vista recovery disk have you got, if you've downloaded one from the web, it may be of no help.

When you say you've isolated it to a hard drive problem, is that because you can get into the bios with it removed? I wouldn't start spending money, until you can analyse the state of the hard disk using a bootcd, you should also be able to download a drive fitness test CD/floppy from Hitachi to check the state of the disk, assuming it's not completely had it.

davb

As others have said, if you want to try and recover your data, then you need to get an external caddy for the drive and mount it as an external USB drive on another PC. You may then be able to run some sort of recovery tool such as Recuva. It depends how much the data is worth to you - you could send it to a data recover company, which would have the best chance of success - but expect to pay a few hundred pounds. There are no guarantees either way.