LAPTOP WONT BOOT UP - Black screen is there and says "A disk read error occurred"

Discussion in 'Mobile Technology' started by kerry7680, Aug 24, 2009.

  1. kerry7680

    kerry7680 Geek Trainee

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    Help Please.

    I am not very good with technical jargon so please don't speak above my head - keep things simple I'm not too knowledgable at this kind of thing.

    My laptop won't boot up.

    On starting it says: A Disk read error occurred
    Press Ctrl Alt Del to restart

    Even after doing Ctrl Alt Del it does not restart the computer.

    I thought it might need to be booted up using a CD, I don't have one so found one on google, downloaded it wrote it CD and then put it in the DVD/CD-RW drive, and THEN , big sigh, the message changed to

    Secondary hard disk drive 0 not found
    A disk read error occurred
    Press Ctrl etc etc

    It's an old laptop, Dell Latitude c600, with windows XP pro sp2 on it, and I am getting a new one at xmas but I like need this to work until then - plus it has A LOT of files I need from here from my uni days, plus a lot of music.

    I will let you know this info in case it makes a difference -

    1) before it did this it started to freeze up on starting, and continued to freeze for about 1 hour until i finally got it to start normal and look normal - it then froze after ten minutes and didn't come back on again. Then I got the black screen and disk read error

    2) I was getting Low Disk Space messages for a couple of weeks before this happened and I kept meaning to delete old files/defrag which I didn't get round to :-(

    3) Just before the computer started to freeze on start up, in other words just before all of the problems started when everything was fine - I was curious and pressed F2 as wanted to see what it was - after looking on google today I now know this was the BIOS. I tinkered a little bit to see what options I had but didn't change anything - or so I thought. After that is when the hour of freezing occurred, after the hour of freezing came the black screen

    Please don't tell me the hard drive has gone? IF so can I still get the information out of it at a computer shop?

    thanks in advance clever people

    K x ;)
     
  2. 0mega9401

    0mega9401 Geek Trainee

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    get a new drive for your machine throw it in and give it a spin! when you get these types of errors alot of the time the drives is kicking off
     

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