You're my only hope..
 

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 :(

Can it be hot switched?

One option might be to boot form CD with the drive out, and then plug it back into the now powered up PC.

I had a very similar problem this week at work - one of our staff had selected about 2 Gb of temp files (long story, poor housekeeping) and hit delete - when it then took over half an hour to work through them, he powered down - leaving the HD with loads of files half deleted and the index trashed - no boot, no nothing.

In the end I had to boot from CD, re-install the OS and strip the files onto a server, before formatting, re-re-installing the OS, and then re-loading the salvaged files form the server.

Of course, if you cannot safely add the drive to a powered up PC you are not in a good place, but if you go to the university's computer section they may be able to lend you the card/cables to slave your toasted HD to your good PC and recover what you can onto the desktop machine.

Jinnkai, pick up an external SATA enclosure. If you're lucky you'll find a tech adapter that has USB to all of SATA and big and small PATA. A full enclosure is $40-$50 and the plain adapters go for <$30.

Next, if it's a hard drive problem do not keep powering it up. Yours isn't likely dying from age issues but it is not worth cooking your data in the hopes it'll randomly work again. Get a plan, the tools, and move very carefully. I've seen numerous cases of power-up-itis that meant recovery moved from simple copy operation to having to crack the case. At that point costs skyrocket and success rates plummet.

Its so bizarre that having the hard drive in causes it to be unable to boot from a CD. If I force the BIOS to CD first, and even do the one-time boot for CD, it comes up with the "Press any key to boot from CD" and then "Inspecting your hardware configuration" like its about to launch the XP installer. Instead, it just stalls out.

I've tried pluggin in an external USB drive, unplugging the main drive, booting into the "Repair Console" on the XP cd, and then re-inserting the old drive. It doesn't detect it at all. I tried using Damn-Small-Linux and Knoppix - they both mount the drive but it appears blank. One time it actually showed the correct sizes (30 GB, 23 GB used..) but still appeared blank. I tried booting from a win98 boot CD, re-inserting the drive, and trying to browse to it. No luck.

Now I'm trying something called Universal Boot CD, which claims to have all sorts of HD diagnostic tools. :(

If all else fails I'll try to look for a SATA enclosure - I'm not sure how that would help, though... if the drive truly IS screwed.