Help Please.
I am not very good with technical jargon so please don't speak above my head - keep things simple I'm not too knowledgable at this kind of thing.
My laptop won't boot up.
On starting it says: A Disk read error occurred
Press Ctrl Alt Del to restart
Even after doing Ctrl Alt Del it does not restart the computer.
I thought it might need to be booted up using a CD, I don't have one so found one on google, downloaded it wrote it CD and then put it in the DVD/CD-RW drive, and THEN , big sigh, the message changed to
Secondary hard disk drive 0 not found
A disk read error occurred
Press Ctrl etc etc
It's an old laptop, Dell Latitude c600, with windows XP pro sp2 on it, and I am getting a new one at xmas but I like need this to work until then - plus it has A LOT of files I need from here from my uni days, plus a lot of music.
I will let you know this info in case it makes a difference -
1) before it did this it started to freeze up on starting, and continued to freeze for about 1 hour until i finally got it to start normal and look normal - it then froze after ten minutes and didn't come back on again. Then I got the black screen and disk read error
2) I was getting Low Disk Space messages for a couple of weeks before this happened and I kept meaning to delete old files/defrag which I didn't get round to :-(
3) Just before the computer started to freeze on start up, in other words just before all of the problems started when everything was fine - I was curious and pressed F2 as wanted to see what it was - after looking on google today I now know this was the BIOS. I tinkered a little bit to see what options I had but didn't change anything - or so I thought. After that is when the hour of freezing occurred, after the hour of freezing came the black screen
Please don't tell me the hard drive has gone? IF so can I still get the information out of it at a computer shop?
thanks in advance clever people
K x ;)
I am not very good with technical jargon so please don't speak above my head - keep things simple I'm not too knowledgable at this kind of thing.
My laptop won't boot up.
On starting it says: A Disk read error occurred
Press Ctrl Alt Del to restart
Even after doing Ctrl Alt Del it does not restart the computer.
I thought it might need to be booted up using a CD, I don't have one so found one on google, downloaded it wrote it CD and then put it in the DVD/CD-RW drive, and THEN , big sigh, the message changed to
Secondary hard disk drive 0 not found
A disk read error occurred
Press Ctrl etc etc
It's an old laptop, Dell Latitude c600, with windows XP pro sp2 on it, and I am getting a new one at xmas but I like need this to work until then - plus it has A LOT of files I need from here from my uni days, plus a lot of music.
I will let you know this info in case it makes a difference -
1) before it did this it started to freeze up on starting, and continued to freeze for about 1 hour until i finally got it to start normal and look normal - it then froze after ten minutes and didn't come back on again. Then I got the black screen and disk read error
2) I was getting Low Disk Space messages for a couple of weeks before this happened and I kept meaning to delete old files/defrag which I didn't get round to :-(
3) Just before the computer started to freeze on start up, in other words just before all of the problems started when everything was fine - I was curious and pressed F2 as wanted to see what it was - after looking on google today I now know this was the BIOS. I tinkered a little bit to see what options I had but didn't change anything - or so I thought. After that is when the hour of freezing occurred, after the hour of freezing came the black screen
Please don't tell me the hard drive has gone? IF so can I still get the information out of it at a computer shop?
thanks in advance clever people
K x ;)