Laptop HD woes

[Red Light]

Ig you can get it to boot at all the the HD is not dead.

It sounds to me like it is not booting at all, just loading the BIOS from RAM and stopping at the point where it needs a bootable disk to go any further.

 

[Angelfishsolo]

It sounds to me like it is not booting at all, just loading the BIOS from RAM and stopping at the point where it needs a bootable disk to go any further.

Can't boot past safe mode screen and even then can't select anything.

To me that implies it has gone through the POST test and the BIOS has loaded. If safe mode is showing on the screen then there is some activity from the drive.

 

[rusky]

If you can see Windows starting to load but it just reboots before getting to the desktop boot from the Windows disc & go to the recovery console & type fixmbr & see what happens.

 

[Angelfishsolo]

If you can see Windows starting to load but it just reboots before getting to the desktop boot from the Windows disc & go to the recovery console & type fixmbr & see what happens.

That's what I was trying to get at earlier

 

[Red Light]

That's what I was trying to get at earlier

If it is starting to boot but getting no further, I had something similar happen on both my daughters' laptops running WinXP. I put it in verbose boot mode and it always stopped at the same point but nothing I tried fixed it so I ended up reinstalling. Fortunately though the HD did work in a caddy so I was able to back up all the files before I did the reinstall.

 

[rusky]

If the fixmbr doesn't work you can always recover the Windows install from the CD.

 

[mattsccm]

Cheers for the answers but you lost me at the bottom of page 1.