My laptop (with all my school notes on it) just went nuts

[TheoPetro]

...finals are in a week and a half and I may have just lost all my notes. I came down this morning and my laptop was on a boot screen showing some "invalid media" error with my eithernet card (its built into the mobo) It kept restarting this screen and I cant get into windows.

The laptop:
HP Pavillion DV8000 17"
upgraded to a gig of ram (2 512 sticks) about 2 months ago

The problem:
Laptop stuck on a boot screen and wont get into windows.

I tried:
Restarting
Changing boot order to HDD first
Disabling the eithernet adapter (nothing in BIOS about this so I dont know how)

To the "should have backed em up" crowd... I know The HDD I was complaining about the didnt come w/ a jumper in OT was for backing this up.

Thanks in advance for any help.

UPDATE:

I just got home and tried swapping the HDD into another laptop and it still wouldnt boot. The error I was getting was:

PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM.

Is there anything I can do?

FINAL UPDATE:

freezer trick didnt work, no IDE device shown in BIOS, HDD ratteling like a maracca. Time to see if the warranty will replace the HDD. Guess this is what I get for not backing up. What a sh!tty lesson to learn.

 

[Slikkster]

Please post the EXACT error message you are getting. Don't paraphrase it.

 

[bruceb]

First it could be one of those new ram sticks is defective.
Next, I would remove the Hard Drive and stick it in an external
enclosure (available almost everywhere they sell computer parts)
then hook it to another pc and get your files off the drive in case
you need to do a full reinstall

 

[TheoPetro]

im at work right now but as soon as I get home I will post it. (maybe 4-5 hrs?)

 

[TheoPetro]

update

 

[Slikkster]

On your original laptop, does the hard drive even show up in the bios (its name and parameters, etc.)? In other words, is the bios even detecting that you have a hard drive?

Can you boot from CD? There are boot CD's/Live CD's that can at least run diagnostics on this hard drive, assuming it can be accessed.

I have to say that in many (certainly not all) cases, this kind of error message (PXE) simply means that the bios can't even see a hard drive, and is trying to boot from anything it can.

So, go back into your laptop's bios --with the suspect hard drive installed--and see if the bios even reports it.

If it does, you might want to make note of your current bios settings and reset the bios to defaults and save, then reboot.

 

[TheoPetro]

last update

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: TheoPetro
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM.

That other PC is trying to boot in "PXE" mode, which means that the network card has been set to look for a special server on the network that will provide it with an operating system.

As to WHY it's trying to boot into PXE mode:
There's no boot OS on either the CD-ROM drive, nor the hard drive, so it tries the third alternative, the NIC.

Unfortunately, it sounds like you have a classic case of hard drive hardware failure, which is always pricey to fix and common enough to make backups mandatory.