Laptop won't boot

We were given a laptop for the kids to use and it has been working fine but suddenly now it will not boot up. When you turn it on you get the message "Non system disk or disk error please replace disk and strike a key when ready". I have tried several times but nothing seems to be working. Its running Windows XP Home and we do not have the original CDs. I have tried to enter setup but when I go to the system information section there is no listing/option for a hard drive. Is the hard drive shot? My understanding is that the laptop is about two years old (compaq presario) and is great for the kids to do papers and other stuff. One of the challenges is that our daughter had just finished typing a paper and now needs to get access to it and can't. The paper is due Monday and I'm struggling with what to do. Geek Squad wants about $350 for a new hard drive and will only restore data files. They will charge about $100 just to retrieve the data. Any thoughts or ideas would be helpful and appreciated?

 

Your hard drive could be shot, but it could be a simple solution (please don't be offended -- I don't know how computer savvy you are):

Do you have a 3.5" floppy disk drive? If so, does it have a disk in it? If so, this would cause that error. Same question for the CD-Rom drive.

 

No 3.5" floppy, does have cd/dvd drive but nothing is in drive.

 

$350 for a hard drive?!?! Wow...the geek squad can get bent. A new 2.5" drive shouldn't run you more than 150 tops, and thats for a higher capacity one (100g).

You should locate an DOS NTFS boot disk image, burn it to CD, and try to boot up with that to see if your C:\ is accessible. You should also look in the BIOS and see if the drive is listed there or if the laptop has any built-in diagnostics.

 

I used to install new Hard Drives in laptops for $125 - 150 for the disk, of course then there was the hourly fee to reload the software. Depending on the speed of the laptop, it would take about an hour and a half. So I charged about $300 bucks for the full install, time and hardware. However, replacing the hard drive will not do anything for the lost data.

What Brim suggested is correct, however if you have a genuine Windows CP CD from any other machine, you can use that to boot the laptop to check to see if C:\ is accessable. If it is, you can buy a copy of XP Home, and reinstall Windows. Obviously, you don't do a destructive (IE: format the drive) install, you do an overwrite of Windows. However, that may be throwing good money after bad, as that drive failed once, it will probably fail again within a few weeks.

If the hard drive is definitely 'gone south', $100 is cheap for data recovery, however, I suspect that's just a starting point, it'll go higher if they can't recover the data using something like SpinRite. My advice: a) get the data off the machine, then b) replace the drive.

This brings up a good rule of thumb I used to tell my customers using laptops for a business. Eventually, a laptop drive will fail; yes all hard drives do fail eventually, but laptop drives are most susceptible due to the movement of the machine. If you have any data on a laptop that you need to save, you had better back it up to something nightly.

 

Thanks for your help and suggestions but after trying a bunch of things the hard drive is dead. I'm going to take it to a company in Reston called Ontrack Data Recovery and see if they can work any magic on the hard drive to recover lost data. If they can recover one file that being my dauughters it will be worth it. Neil, thanks for the reminder that I should back up my data more often than I do (weekly).

Genco

 

Ouch!!! I just got the quote and it's $100 for evaluating the drive and determining what can be recovered and then anywhere from $600 - $2,200 for recovering the file(s).

 

Does your daughter have a paper copy ?? Sure sounds cheaper to retype the data, than to try and recover it.

 

Neil,

She is starting to re-type it as we speak and the tech support guys where I work are going to try and see if they can access the hard drive with the tools that they have.

 

Good luck !! I've had some success with SpinRite ... but it does take a while with these huge hard drives.

 

I've never tried this myself, buy one of my co-workers said that he recovered files by going to Microcenter. He thought it cost about $50, and he sat with them while they looked through the hard drive. He told them which files he wanted, and they created a disk for him. It's probably worth a call to see how much they'd charge.

 

It depends on how badly failed the drive is. If its making any kind of noise, don't expect software to be able to do much with it. Between constant movement while running and bad thermal design, its surprising they last that long.

Unless the data is absolutely critical (tax return info, etc...), I'd advoid paying anyone any money upfront. There are a lot of fly by nighters in the "data-recovery" industry, and they have some nasty clauses (Money upfront regardless of results, they keep the drive). On-Track is a great service, and the huge price tag is representative to the amount of work they would need to perform to recover a physically failed drive.