Laptop wont boot

[MrTeeny]

I've got an HP laptop (almost a year old) which suddenly stopped working. I've never had a problem with it, but when I attempted to turn it on today it would not boot. It powers on, I can open the cd drive and I hear the fans but I can't detect any hard drive activity. It has 2 drives. It boots from the C drive which has all my progams and I store all my data, photos, etc. on the D drive.

I'm not too worried about the C drive but I really NEED a lot of the stuff thats on the D drive. Anyone have any insight on what steps I should take to get it.

Thanks.

 

[Boobs McGee]

What do you get on the screen? Do you see any BIOS screens or get any video at all? Any beeps?

Some potential steps depending on what your situation would be to try to boot to a cd, check the bios to see if the hard drive shows up...

 

[octopus41092]

If you just want to get stuff off the drives buy an external enclosure stick the hard drives in and plug that into another computer.

 

[Laputa]

Depending on how the hard drives are setup. Could be a hard drive failure, or could also be a RAID failure. Since it has two drives, could be a stripe set with 2 partitions. Or they could also be a spanned volume. Best is to see if the two drives are still visible in the BIOS. If they are, you can try octopus suggestion. If it's a stripe set and one of the drive is not showing up, you will need to figure out how to image the failed drive first before you can do anything else. Basically half of your data is on one drive and the other half on the other. Without the other drive working, everything you get will be half corrupt. If it's a spanned volume, you can get off whatever is/are on the working drive(s)

 

[kh4130]

Did you try booting the computer with the battery removed and the computer plugged into the AC adapter? I have seen bad batteries that made computers not boot.

If not, I would try to boot the drive externally -- if its not two drives that are in RAID. If its one drive with two drives then just hook it up externally to get your data off.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Are we sure its actually 2 separate drives and not just 1 drive with 2 partitions?