My HDD Delema Please Help!!

Jamieb

New Member
I have a Toshiba Satellite pro A210 running windows XP.
Last week it was having a problem when I would start it up it would get to the windows XP loading screen then reboot, and then get to the same screen and reboot etc...
I fixed this by using the Windows XP installation disk and doing a Repair (r)
Now today while I was on it froze so I turned it off and started it up again, it got to the loading screen for the actual laptop (Not windows XP) then got stuck there for a long time then it would go to a black screen or another 5ish minutes then a flashing “-” would appear in the top left corner for a few minutes before returning to a plain black screen. Then after another couple of minutes “Setup is inspecting your computer’s hardware configuration...” would appear for approx 2 minutes before going back to a plain black screen. During this time I can hear the CD drive spinning up.
It was coming up saying “Operating system not found” but now it seems to be staying on the black screen...
I also have a external enclosure, I hooked the HD up to this and connected it to a computer running Vista but I cannot locate the External drive, The only other time I’ve used the enclosure was last time I had a HD stop working and I couldn’t find the drive that time either, so it could be the enclosure?
 
It sounds like your laptops drive has failed. It's possible that the enclosure has a problem but if you only use it to try and access drives that have failed it's kind of expected that you may not be able to see it ;)

It's easy to check the enclosure, just get a known working drive and see if it you can access it from windows.
 
Yer i assumed the HDD was stuffed, the hd isnt important, i just want whats on it..

The HDD is only about 18 months old too..

I dont have another working HDD to test with.

If i try to boot the laptop with no HD it goes to the blue screen that gives me the choice to install a new OS or repair the existing one (If i choose anything it obviously says no HD found) So it is behaving differently if i have no hd in, which gives me a small amount of hope
 
If the hard drive has failed, the only way to get data off of it is to take it to a professional, which is NOT cheap.
 
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