I do this for a living, but I'm too bleary-eyed to follow up tonight. Shoot me a PM and let me know tomorrow.
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Is it seeing your boot drive? What does the BIOS say?
I do this for a living, but I'm too bleary-eyed to follow up tonight. Shoot me a PM and let me know tomorrow.
Rebooting with your recovery disk isn’t all bad news. Typically you don’t lose your data (unless you reformat), but you do need to re-install your applications — which is a jolly jumping nuisance but not the end of the world.
(Best Buy will honor the warranty, even if you did not buy it there.)
Do you have a disk in the CD drive or an SD card in a slot.
You don’t give enough info to diagnose. What is the error message?
Make sure you don’t have any disk in the floppy drive.
I tried to buy an HP laptop, once. I bought three of them in less than a week. They all had something wrong with them. I brought them back and got a new one, three times.
After demanding my money back and no more tries at finding a unit that actually worked...they sent me home with a higher priced Toshiba, at an HP price....
And I’m posting this reply on that same Toshiba...six years later.....
If you do have to run the HP recovery program, you might want to keep in mind that (it’s my recollection) the HP recovery program reformats the hard drive. In that case, getting your data back will be a real problem.
BEFORE reformatting your laptop drive, you might want to consider getting a laptop to desktop hard drive adapter (just google that phrase; the adapters are about $10.00), removing the drive from the laptop, and attaching the laptop drive to your desktop computer as a secondary drive. (unless you made your desktop computer yourself, your desktop probably has the ability to recognize multiple drives). Then boot from the main drive on your desktop.
Since the laptop drive isn’t recognizing the boot sector, you might not even have to change the pin connections on the laptop drive; if the computer recognizes the laptop drive as primary, but can’t boot from it, the BIOS will probably just move to the next item on your boot list, which would be whatever drive you normally boot from. If, however, you have to change the pin connections, it’s easy: there’s probably a diagram on the laptop drive, near a group of small recessed pins. The diagram will have a representation of how you need to connect the pins to designate the laptop drive as a secondary drive. Wrap some wire around the specified pair of pins, and you’re set.
Once you get your laptop drive connected to your desktop computer, you can boot up, and possibly read the data from the laptop drive. Transferring your data out of the laptop drive would be done the standard way (drag and drop if you are running Windows).
Your laptop fan might be clogged. Try and see if it rotates on startup.
As long as your disk isn’t encrypted, use a linux live cd and copy to usb thumb drives or burn a disk of all your files, then do a complete system restore.
At least you won’t loose anything.
Assuming you are fairly technical when it comes to PCs and understand what I’m talking about.
Use another pc to build a bootable pendrive/usb with standard Windoze utilities. Power cycle your machine, change your boot order, boot from pendrive. Start by running check disk on your PC.
Sidebar - does your pc have Norton? I has caused lots of problems today.
If you can get in to bios that's good .....see if the bios sees the hard disk...if it does ...
Then set your cd as the first boot device and boot from a bootable cd... once booted from a cd esc out to a promp and see if you can access the harddisk dir or even a promp for the drive...
If you can you get this far and access the disk it's probable not a hardware problem but have an OS (software problem)
HP Ping!
Does it post at all? In other words do you see any text come up on the screen at all? If so, hit the delete key (or whichever key it says to enter setup) to go into setup. Under general or main you should see the IDE devices listed which should show your hard disk. If it says empty for each listing then the BIOS is not seeing the hard drive so it is likely bad.
One of the tabs will allow you to set the boot order. Set it so it boots from CD first.
Get a Linux Live CD and try to boot from that. If you can then it is either the hard drive or software related (OS corrupt, bad drivers, etc.).
If it does boot, try to navigate to your hard disk, if you can see it then it is software related.
Here is a list of live CDs and their primary functions
Note that not all versions of Linux may work with your laptop, and even if it boots you may not get all of the hardware to work due to driver issues etc. That is not important at this point. You just want to see if your laptop will run, period. Even if it gets to the first startup screen with the Linux live CD and locks up or quits there is hope. Try a different Linux version. Knoppix is usually a good one to try as is Ubuntu or Suse.
If you can get it to boot from a Linux live CD then first you want to take out the laptop drive and connect it to another PC using and external drive case for 2.5" drives and see if you can get the data off.
If you can get the data off then restore the system using the rescue disks that came with the laptop. If the drive can't be seen or read from then you need to get another laptop drive and re-install using the rescue disks that came with the laptop.
If it will not boot at all with the Linux live CD then it is a hardware problem such as bad motherboard, processor, etc.
Good luck
A Hewlett Packard, huh? I bought a brand new one. It lasted for 6 months; then it died. I’m out 1,000 bucks.