[Digital_Jedi]

I have a laptop i am trying to fix... i was on and working in windows vista and then I got turned off normally. when trying to turn back on it says boot device not found, insert boot disk... blah blah..... its on hp laptop... and there were no physical boot CD's... it had a recovery partition instead.... got it to a point to repair start up and that didn't work so prompted to do a system restore... nothing.... did a repair and a restore twice... nothing.... went into BIOS to do a hard disk diagnostic.... said no hard disk exists... im thinking hard drive failure... any other ideas before I break the bad news? I can replace the HD and put on a new copy of windows...

[Alvin.C]

Hello,

You could try resetting your BIOS, and reseating the HDD inside your laptop. If those steps aren't successful, then it's likely that your HDD is kaput.

You could test your laptops hard drive in another system (if possible), or buy a new hard drive to see if it resolves the problem.

[ehgit]

If you can, look for the SpinRite software, it's like $80 but can be well worth it. I've used it and gotten some pretty impressive results. On one occasion, though, it has not worked as expected (it was on a large capacity external HDD so that may have been the reason it didn't work) but overall it's really good and has performed more than one "miracle"!