Need Serious Help

E

expy45

New Member
Ok im not very computer literate when it comes to fixing computers so bare with me.

Ok so im going to start from the begining and give every detail hoping something helps:

The computer is a Gateway MX6027

I was using my computer the other night no problems... Woke up shut it put it in my backpack and went to class. After class i went to go use it, opened it, turned it on and all i see is a blank white screen.

From here i hit ctrl alt delete, esc, try restarting it and i keep getting the same thing. So at this point im assuming my monitor has gone out. I went to my parents house and hooked up their pc monitor to my labtop and it comes on on that monitor. my screen is still white by the way.

when i see its turning on it goes past the gateway boot screen to the screen that says:
Press F11 to start recovery
but also says:
MBR Error
Operation Systems not found

the booting stops at this point

i started playing with my monitor and my screen would show if i would kinda twist it in a certain way but the color would be a distorted red color with all the words showing.

From here i restart the computer and go to the BIOS settings. Let me say I dont really know much about this BIOS screen but i went here and reset to the default settings.

After this I booted and it made it past the Press 11 to start recovery and went to the Windows loading screen but just sat there loading until it eventually restarted and continued this process.

So i went back to my house and inserted my System Recovery CD/DVD and my monitor goes back to normal. now at this point it goes through the Gateway boot screen to a screen that says:
Gateway System Recovery
Press 'R' to display Gateway System Recovery options
Press F11 to start recovery
A disk read error occured
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

I restarted it and hit 'R' next tiem this came up and it gives me the option to:
Press 'R' to display Gateway System Recovery options
you will boot into the recovery partition or on CD if no recovery partition is found
Press'Q' to quit and to boot the OS on hard disk

When i hit R it says 'Starting Recovery...' then goes to a screen that says:
Gateway System Recovery
No hard disk found.
Gateway System Recovery cannot be continued!
Press any key to continue

When i go back and hit Q it says:
Booting System...
A disk read error occurred
Press Ctrl Alt Del to restert

If anyone can help my id really appreciate it. One thing that is extremely important to me is that I NEED to get my files off of this hard drive. I have extremely important class stuff as well as a ton of stuff with sentimental value. Im planning on getting a new computer now because of having so many problems with this so i dont mind saying bye to the computer as long as i can get the files off of it.
 
From the sounds of it your hard drive may be going bad. When you went into the bios, did it still show that your hard drive was present as a boot device?
 
under the boot menu on BIOS it lists:

DVD/CD ROM Drive
Removable Device
Main Hard Drive
Boot to LAN
USB Storage Stick
 
Yeah, that sounds like a bad hard drive... if it is the only thing I can think of to fix it would be zero filling it (probably using a Linux CD.) The problem is that if you do that you'll lose your files... do you have a backup of everything important?

EDIT: Oh yeah, btw, the boot menu on the BIOS seems to be OK, but I have to say that I've never seen a BIOS that just says "Main Hard Drive" and doesn't have the brand name and stuff like that. Maybe it's just something Gateway did to their BIOS... prebuilt computer companies are notorious for locking the BIOS and changing things around.
 
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i know im dumb but no i dont have anything backed up. i read stuff about moving the hard drive into another computer to pull the files off is there any way that would work for me?
 
expy45 said:
i know im dumb but no i dont have anything backed up. i read stuff about moving the hard drive into another computer to pull the files off is there any way that would work for me?
Click to expand...

Well, maybe it's because I'm dumb too, but I don't really have anything backed up either. :P

It'll be tricky since it's a laptop, but yeah it's possible... as long as the hard drive is okay, the problem is that it seems like the hard drive isn't ok.

Here's what I would do if I were you... I'd go download the Ubuntu Linux live CD here: http://www.ubuntu.com/

Then burn the downloaded file to a CD using this guide: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BurningIsoHowto NOTE: USE THAT GUIDE TO BURN IT... THERE IS A DIFFERENT METHOD TO BURN AN UBUNTU CD THAN YOU WOULD NORMALLY USE TO BURN A CD!

Basically then all you have to do is put the CD in the drive of the broken computer, start up the computer, choose your language, and choose "Try Ubuntu without any change to you computer"

A loading screen will then come up (depending on your hardware it might show up as a black screen with white lettering... don't worry about it as you won't have to type anything in and it's completely normal.)

Now you will be met with a desktop operating system (Welcome to Linux!) that is running right off of a CD without touching your hard drive... what you have to do is click "Places > Computer" in the menu and then find your hard drive... double click on it (if nothing happens try right clicking on the icon and clicking "mount drive" and then double clicking on it.) If that doesn't work I'd say you have a broken hard drive...

I hope that made sense and that it didn't just confuse you more. :P
 
Sounds to me like the video card on the laptop is out, I work on dell laptops and the screens will change colors and show nothing else. Then you plug up a monitor and it works fine. The bottom second of your post sounds like a bad hard-drive.
 
Probably you did solve it, but I post about it in case you didn't.
You could recover your data from the bad harddisk. You could add as second harddisk on your parents computes and try to read it. If this is not possible there are a lot of recovery software on Internet. It will be useful for you. If you format it or install another operating system you will lose all your data.
 
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