Latop Won't Boot Up

[hc4361]

Had blue screen of death, then clunking, banging noise from area of hard drive.
Turned it off, turned it on again. More clunking noises then - Operating System not found.

Tried installing Ubuntu from a CD, - hard drive not found.

Is it dead? Windows XP.


Any point at all in buying an external caddy and seeing if the hard drive can be accessed by another machine?

[MarkRae]

Certainly sounds like the hard drive has died - it happens...

An external caddy would certainly allow you to remove the hard drive and see if it can be accessed by another machine - I suppose it depends on whether you consider that the expense of doing that, plus the expense of buying a replacement hard disk, is worth the hassle, or just buy a completely new machine...

[Greedyfly]

Caddy should only cost around £10-£12 - that's how much mine was when my laptop went boom recently.

[jake-the-peg]

Wouldn't have thought so

Does the bios still recognise the HDD? if not another O/S wont help you.

If you've got valuable data on there there are companies who might be able to help you but it won't be cheap.

I think a lot of us have had painful lessons about backups in our past

[ChuckFickens]

almost certainly going to be a dead hard drive than anything else, so a caddy won't help apart from to determine that it is definitely the hard drive at fault

Replacement hard drives are not too expensive though.

[hc4361]

Thanks all. The laptop is old and I do back up to various external devices, so not too much data lost.
The tip it is, I think.