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FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU - IT help needed, please.

ONLY NICE THINGS

20:39 / 07.03.04

I'm not in a good mood.

Why am I not in a good mood? Way-ull...I have just turned on my laptop to try to get some work done, to be greeted by repeated attempts from the server to boot from CD. Having tried restarting a few times, I gave up and whacked in the Windows XP Office CD. This told me cheerily that it could not detect a hard drive. Wha?

Arsebadgers! I wouldn't mind, but this laptop's been nothing but trouble. When I first got it I had to send it back because it was missing 256MB of RAM, and then the graphics card (integrated w/ the motherboard) seems to have started going, as whenever I used Direct 3D the screen intermittently went fuzzy, and now this bollocks. It's all really rather vexing...

Made rather worse by the fact that the company that warrantied it went into liquidation. Bastards! And I thought I was being all clever by shopping around...

So, does anyone have any handy hints, and if not does anyone know any good laptop repair people in the Victoria area?

23:32 / 07.03.04

Well, a couple things spring to mind immediatley. Without knowing the make and model of the laptop, it might be hard to tell what was in the empty bay, if anything. find the manual, online or physically.

I'm hoping it's an unexplained BIOS fault. check the BIOS (when you power up the machine, one of the first things on screen should be a "push F2 for setup" or somesuch. do that). there should be an option to AutoDetect the primary drive. try that, see what happens, let us know.

Worst case scenario is that your HD is fried, which happened to me a month ago. it was heralded by a series of clicking noises, metal on metal taps, so an absence of strange noises is probably a good sign for you. Good luck.

08:03 / 08.03.04

sounds like the laptop is trying to boot from the cd...,take out any cd's ,restart the machine,go into the bois(setup f2,or del or whatever the screen tells you at startup),once you are in the setup screen look for a heading that says boot order,this will probably say cd first followed by floppy or hd or possibly network,set the order to boot from hd first...now hit save and exit restart your machine and tell me what happens.....your bios settings are stored using battery power,if the battery dies your bios resets to defaults,this could explain the machines desire to boot from cd,easily sorted with a £1.00 battery.....also tell me the model you are using

ONLY NICE THINGS

09:14 / 13.03.04

Bless you, guys - I'd thought this thread had died... will try the BIOS settings and then report back tomorrow

ONLY NICE THINGS

10:20 / 13.03.04

Well, having Read T FM (which i finally found), it turns out that I was indeed worrying over nothing. The hard drive caddy is elsewhere entirely. Unfortunately, the compy is still unable to recognise it - I changed the BIOS settings back to default, which should mean it tried to boot firt from CD-ROM and then from IDE-01, i.e the hard drive, but it simply doesn't acknowledge that the hard drive exists...

10:41 / 13.03.04

I'm tempted to think that either something has come loose (not so bad) or the drive is fucked for some reason. In my experience drives that are preparing to fuck themselves herald it with a period of bad behaviour, odd noises, strange crashes and so on. Like solid_state says, if you've not been having those then that's a good sign. But it sounds like it's repair shop time either way, I wouldn't be comfortable with taking a laptop apart even if there's no warranty left to invalidate.

15:39 / 13.03.04

pull out the hd caddy , clean all the connectors...and give it another go