I got a brand new Inspiron E1505 in the beginning of August, and it's been amazing since. It's faster than my desktop and I'd been using it for everything. I had the entire Macromedia suite, the entire Adobe suite, Office 2003, Visual Studio 2003 and 2005, two versions of the DirectX SDK, Maya 7, 3DS Max, FM7, Cubase SX3, Terragen, and a million other things on there. All of my notes since the beginning of class were taken on my laptop - OneNote 2003, as a combination of writing and typing.
Since it was brand new (less than two months, at this point) I hadn't even made a backup yet. And alas, I was playing EverQuest II tonight with my girlfriend and it locked up while loading a zone. I hard booted (pressed the power button) and turned it back on.
When I press the power button, the battery light comes on and the HD indicator blinks (seemingly to represent activity). The BIOS comes up, does a brief POST, and begins to boot. Only it doesn't. After the BIOS splash screen is displayed, it goes blank. The HD indicator stops, and there is no discernable sound coming from it.
Scared outta my mind, I first tried removing the ram. It's got 1 gig of DDR2, so I pulled each 512 out one at a time to see if it would progress. It does not. I tried re-arranging the boot order in the BIOS so that it would boot from a CD first, and it does not.
Interestingly, if I remove the hard drive from the computer completely, it will boot from a CD. However, with the boot sequence set CD/Floppy/HD in the BIOS and even using f12 "One-time boot override" to select CD, it will not boot from the CD if the hard drive is in.
The HD doesn't seem to be making any clicking noises, either.
It's actually an internal SATA drive, but I don't have SATA cables nor a motherboard that would support it (to test the drive from a working computer).
ANY suggestions? The data on that drive is incredibly important - as is having a working laptop. Suggest anything you can think of, because I'm completely out of ideas.. and scared
