Please help - laptop has died

nnik

Was having speed problems with laptop yesterday so did a clean up with CCleaner than tried to defrag but couldn't. I decided to resart computer and when I try to turn it on I have this:

SMART Failure Predicted on Hard Disc 0
WARNING: Immediately back-up our data and replace you hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent.
Press F1 to Continue

However, when I press F1 I just get a black screen.

Have I lost everything? And how do I back-up if I cannot get computer started properly?

Please help if you can. Not sure if I'm going to have to pay to get it fixed, hope not because I definately do not have the money at the moment.

Thank you in advance.

nnik

Sorry, when I press F1 I get a windows error report and then when it tries to restart I get the black screen.

Parva

Sounds like the hard drive has died I'm afraid. The good news is that it's easily replaceable and quite cheap to do so. The bad news is that it's looking like you may have lost whatever was on it if it refuses to spin-up. There are companies out there that specialise in recovering data from dead hard drives but this will not be cheap.

nnik

Thank you Parva.
The cost is what I'm affraid of.
My own fault tho, should have kept up-to-date back ups.

oneblondebrow

Do you have access to a second computer?

If so then try creating a USB boot drive, Googling USB boot drive gives you loads of options and simple run through's on creating them.

This was you can hopefully see your old Hard Disk Drive and maybe pull some of the data from it, Assuming that the Hard Drive fault may only be causing a malfunction with the booting of the operating system.

If you decide to go down this route then im sure we can give you a little more help if required.

closed

http://download.cnet.com/Rescue-Kit-Free-Edition/3000-2094_4-10910591.html

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

if it's a sata drive, they can be bought for under £30-£40

older pata drives are rarer now, and therefore more expensive.

RockPaperScissors

There is a programme called Activ8 that an IT friend used to recover my data. It worked despite the disk not spinning up.

Alternatively, the second time it happened I was instructed to buy one of these I managed to remove the hardrive myself following the instructions and was able to get all mydata off of it - and have a handy extra large USB storage device

It can also be a system board failure so get that data out quick

AndysDad

There is a programme called Activ8 that an IT friend used to recover my data. It worked despite the disk not spinning up.

Sounds a brillant piece of software or maybe he's a genius:rotfl: