My laptop randomly bit the dust today after only a year. I am rapidly loosing faith in a possible resucitation. I’ve tried all of the discs that came with it an it won’t boot from anyone them. It just jusks me various disc read errors. I can’t get into the system either to get my files off of it. Any idea on how to fix it? Before it died it was etting really slow and copying stuff from CD to the hard drive was really slow, openning programs took much longer. So any suggestions? The biggest problem is that it has all of my papers on it.
Is it dead or does it turn on and give you a message?
It turns on, but none of the restore discs work and I can’t into the OS it says “Disk read error.”
If you don’t have a disc in the drive when you start up does it give you that message?
Yes, and then it says to ush Crtl+Atl+Delete to restart.
What about a simply floppy boot disk? Pop into a DOS and copy the files over.
I REALLY need to restore it since it has a bunch of papers I’ve worked on. Is there any way to do that? Also, I don’t have a DOS disc and my laptop doesn’t have a floppy drive, I have a USB one for it, but not one built into it.
Ok I’m not sure about this because you should be able to boot up with the disc. Just in case check the bios when it tries to boot up something in the bootup order might have gotten switched around somehow. I think mine goes Hard drive, cd-rom, then floppy drive.
Mine is set too boot from CD->Hard Drive->LAN->Something else
My Cd might be first I don’t know and I don’t feel like shutting my computer off. you could contact tech support about it, but it looks like I won’t be able to help you. Sorry
Thanks anyway, I guess I’ll try to give them a call tomorrow. Anyone else?
try moving the HD to a diff computer, and slaving it and copying necessarythings.
It’s a laptop, I can’t take the hard drive out.
That’s strange. I can take out my drives at will.
laptop drives are removeable, they are just 2.5" IDe in stead of the standard 3.5", still same pins, so drive swapping is easy 
Secondly, restoring off your restore disks will actually format your drive, so you will lose all the data on it anyway 
So dont do that.
Thirdly, it sounds to me like your HDD is kaput. Those error messages usually indicate a physical failure with the drive, usually the most common part to burn out is the motor, but your mileage may vary. Taking out a laptop HDD is really rather simple. Remove the baseplate sections, one is for RAM, one is for power and the other is your HDD. It should be th largest removeable plate, somewhat about 50% larger than a credit card. You can then unplug it and move it to a secondary computer
Son of a bitch.
Don’t shoot the messenger