Has my laptop hard drive failed???

[RhysJamesIT]

Hi all,
Im pretty new here and I need some advice.

Ive quite an odd query. My power jack broke on my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo EL series laptop so I cut it and soldered it straight to the motherboard where the jack used to be. The laptop powers up fine and doesnt lose power, and the first time I started up my laptop I got to the windows desktop and XP booted fine, but then I had the 'Blue Screen of Death'. I restarted the laptop but now the hardware doesnt seem to be able to detect the hard drive. When booting up, BIOS tells me that there has been an HDD error. I have tried to reinstall XP with the XP CD but the setup cannot find the hard drive.

Im wondering whether it was something to do with the fact that I had the polarity wrong at first when wiring up the adaptor.

Does anybody think it is the hard drive that has failed or if the problem is with the other hardware? Is there any point me paying for a new hard drive with the risk that it may be my laptop that is broke? I think its worth mentioning that BIOS still recognizes the CPU and its speed and it recognizes my amount of RAM, but just not the hard drive.

Kindest Regards
Rhys

 

[DMGrier]

I would say HDD. If your cable broke why didn't you just buy a new one? You probably fried your hard drive.

 

[RhysJamesIT]

The actual jack broke off, the socket that is soldered onto the motherboard broke, so there was nowhere to plug the adaptor into.

So I just cut the adaptor and soldered it to the motherboard... come to think of it, it was a competely stupid idea.