Laptop wont boot, what now?

[blue-eye-boy]

Hi all, this morning a friend of mine phoned me, telling me her laptop don't boot. So off I went, just to see that when I turn it on, it comes to where I can say the harddrive must start doing its thing, but the screen just stay blank. And the hdd light is also off, the one that tells you when it's working. So what I told her, is maybe the hdd popped. Am I right? I did try booting from a xp cd, but then windows wants to install again. She says that for the past week or so the laptop seems slower, but she did suspect that something was wrong.

 

[noswal]

Probably need something like spinrite to fix it (www.grc.com)

 

[|tera|]

Enter the BIOS setup as you turn on the laptop, maybe someone changed something there.

Normally you press del, F2 or F1 as soon as the pc starts up, it should say something like "to enter setup press del". Press it repeatedly until it accesses the setup

Look for an option that say Load Failsafe Defaults, enable it and save and exit.

If it boots fine, restart and enter the BIOS again, now look for the option that says Load Optimized Defaults, enable it and save and exit.

The hdd could have crashed as well

 

[blue-eye-boy]

I did check the bios. Why I think it is the hdd, is cause it doesn't start at all, just when the operating system must start.

 

[|tera|]

You could always open it and check if the hdd cables are fitted correctly, with moving it around etc. it could have got loose

 

[blue-eye-boy]

Okay, I'll try. Thanks

 

[fskmh]

If it has a Seagate drive, burn this bootable 2MB ISO to a cd and try it:
http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/SeaToolsDOS.iso

If it doesn't work with your drive or support another manufacturer's drive (I've only used it with Seagate drivers) then go to the relevant site and download their tool.