Topic: Laptop won’t start

[Sho'Time]

My laptop has completely stopped working on me, basically when I switch it on it loads up a windows starting screen with a whirring load icon, after a short while the screen goes completely black before another load icon appears and it just stays on there without doing anything. I’ve had it left on fully charged for over 2 hours with no joy, as well as switching it on & off numerous times.

Any suggestions on the problem and/or a fix? I’ll try and upload pictures of the screen for context if it helps.

[OpenC]

Which Windows is it?  Have you tried starting it in safe mode?  And aye, a picture of the second screen would be useful (the first one I assume is just the plain Windows startup screen)

[Super Duper Branko Strupar]

Either the registry is f***ed or if you have an hhd your disk could be f***ed. If it's the first, can you enter bios mode when starting up? And you'll need to try and reinstall windows. If not, could well be the second and you need to fling it out the window.

[Northerngimp]

See if you can start it in safe mode, what model and make is the laptop...google the issue and you might find that its a common problem with that model or make and find a solution from a tech forum.  Is it under warranty ?

Try taking the battery out and connecting the AC, sounds weird but we had some HP laptops a few years back which would wouldn't boot properly then we just happened to remove the battery with AC connected and it fired up ok. 

Is it windows 10, 8 or 7...or XP?

[Sho'Time]

I took it to a computer repair shop and they've confirmed the hard-drive is the issue. I have videos on there which aren't backed up of all my little lads first birthday, xmas etc. so we're gutted.

A local PC repair place has quoted us either £300 (inc. VAT) for what they refer to as a 'Stage 2' data recovery process or £420 for a 'Stage 3' data recovery. Because it's been out of action for just over 2 weeks they've come up with the usual line of "we can't guarantee it will work but our success rate is very good". I'm really unsure as I just simply don't have the money but my lass is determined to find it and get it for these pictures so it's a f***ing nightmare.

Can anybody advise if this would work at all? Am I being ripped off? Any help would be really appreciated.

[Sho'Time]

See if you can start it in safe mode, what model and make is the laptop...google the issue and you might find that its a common problem with that model or make and find a solution from a tech forum.  Is it under warranty ?

Try taking the battery out and connecting the AC, sounds weird but we had some HP laptops a few years back which would wouldn't boot properly then we just happened to remove the battery with AC connected and it fired up ok. 

Is it windows 10, 8 or 7...or XP?

It's a HP, Windows 7.

[loki679]

How computer savvy are you? If you're up to it you could pull the disk out and try some data recovery software first on another computer.  Just make sure nothing is written to the disk before you've got your files off.

[neesy111]

I took it to a computer repair shop and they've confirmed the hard-drive is the issue. I have videos on there which aren't backed up of all my little lads first birthday, xmas etc. so we're gutted.

A local PC repair place has quoted us either £300 (inc. VAT) for what they refer to as a 'Stage 2' data recovery process or £420 for a 'Stage 3' data recovery. Because it's been out of action for just over 2 weeks they've come up with the usual line of "we can't guarantee it will work but our success rate is very good". I'm really unsure as I just simply don't have the money but my lass is determined to find it and get it for these pictures so it's a f***ing nightmare.

Can anybody advise if this would work at all? Am I being ripped off? Any help would be really appreciated.

If you have to do the repair service, they go direct.  All HDD recovery by small PC shops is sent to a specialist firm's who deal with it.

[Sho'Time]

How computer savvy are you? If you're up to it you could pull the disk out and try some data recovery software first on another computer.  Just make sure nothing is written to the disk before you've got your files off.

Not in the slightest.  Because the videos are so important my lass is insisting it's done professionally and not just handed over to someone that knows a bit about computers.

[Sho'Time]

I took it to a computer repair shop and they've confirmed the hard-drive is the issue. I have videos on there which aren't backed up of all my little lads first birthday, xmas etc. so we're gutted.

A local PC repair place has quoted us either £300 (inc. VAT) for what they refer to as a 'Stage 2' data recovery process or £420 for a 'Stage 3' data recovery. Because it's been out of action for just over 2 weeks they've come up with the usual line of "we can't guarantee it will work but our success rate is very good". I'm really unsure as I just simply don't have the money but my lass is determined to find it and get it for these pictures so it's a f***ing nightmare.

Can anybody advise if this would work at all? Am I being ripped off? Any help would be really appreciated.

If you have to do the repair service, they go direct.  All HDD recovery by small PC shops is sent to a specialist firm's who deal with it.

These guys have made a big deal over how they do it in-house, apparently they have £000's worth of equipment to help them specialise with data recovery.

[Northerngimp]

See if you can start it in safe mode, what model and make is the laptop...google the issue and you might find that its a common problem with that model or make and find a solution from a tech forum.  Is it under warranty ?

Try taking the battery out and connecting the AC, sounds weird but we had some HP laptops a few years back which would wouldn't boot properly then we just happened to remove the battery with AC connected and it fired up ok. 

Is it windows 10, 8 or 7...or XP?

It's a HP, Windows 7.

Do you have another machine in the house, a PC or a laptop? 

[Sho'Time]

See if you can start it in safe mode, what model and make is the laptop...google the issue and you might find that its a common problem with that model or make and find a solution from a tech forum.  Is it under warranty ?

Try taking the battery out and connecting the AC, sounds weird but we had some HP laptops a few years back which would wouldn't boot properly then we just happened to remove the battery with AC connected and it fired up ok. 

Is it windows 10, 8 or 7...or XP?

It's a HP, Windows 7.

Do you have another machine in the house, a PC or a laptop?

I've got a Mac and a work laptop.

[SEMTEX]

pay someone

[Sho'Time]

pay someone

As in the pro's at the shop, or just someone that knows plenty of s*** about computers? Our lass is going mad about these videos being lost so is angling for a 'professional shop' owning it - we have no idea if it's straightforward enough that anyone who knows their way around a computer should be able to do this with just as much chance of success as these 'professionals' as we're complete novices around computers and this sort of thing.

[SEMTEX]

I probably couldn't give a strong opinion on the abilities of that shop, but there are certainly benefits to them being local and managing it for you. I would probably just suck it up and pay them, esp if they say they do it in house.

Question - how did these photos/videos get taken? Maybe there are backups somewhere you're unaware of.

Also, back your s*** up. Plenty of mega corps offer shitloads of cloud storage for barely any cost.

[Sho'Time]

I probably couldn't give a strong opinion on the abilities of that shop, but there are certainly benefits to them being local and managing it for you. I would probably just suck it up and pay them, esp if they say they do it in house.

Question - how did these photos/videos get taken? Maybe there are backups somewhere you're unaware of.

Also, back your s*** up. Plenty of mega corps offer shitloads of cloud storage for barely any cost.

They were on a camcorder, transferred to that PC and erased from the camcorder so definitely not any back-ups.

We'd been talking about an external HD for ages but just never got round to doing it we're looking into that and Cloud for future ref.

[SEMTEX]

Oh s***. Yeah I doubt your camcorder was backing up to the cloud

There are all manner of easy and cheap backup solutions. I'd chalk this one up as a loss, get the stuff recovered properly and get a robust and easy backup plan. Nothing that involves you manually backing s*** up, something automatic.

[Super Duper Branko Strupar]

Also depends how f***ed your drive is, btw. If the disk is particularly damaged sometimes there's nothing anyone can do. Be aware there is a real possibility you could pay £300+ and not get anything from it...

[SEMTEX]

Aye, what actually happens with your drive when you go to start up? Any weird noises? No activity whatsoever from the drive?

No activity is probably better than any crunchy/whirry/clicky s***.

[Sho'Time]

No noises or anything, so I suppose that's something - it's only been around 2 weeks and I've probably only tried it 6 or 7 times.

[OpenC]

Alternatively, if the laptop is f***ed anyway and you're buying a new one, then pull the drive out of the old one and buy a kit which will allow you you mount it as an external drive via USB and just see if you can recover them yourself.  I've still got every hard drive from every computer I ever had and I just use them for backup with a cheap usb/HDD kit

[SEMTEX]

One would hope the repair shop had tried that one like.

[Northerngimp]

See if you can start it in safe mode, what model and make is the laptop...google the issue and you might find that its a common problem with that model or make and find a solution from a tech forum.  Is it under warranty ?

Try taking the battery out and connecting the AC, sounds weird but we had some HP laptops a few years back which would wouldn't boot properly then we just happened to remove the battery with AC connected and it fired up ok. 

Is it windows 10, 8 or 7...or XP?

It's a HP, Windows 7.

Do you have another machine in the house, a PC or a laptop?

I've got a Mac and a work laptop.

Buy one of those USB SSD or HDD cradles from PC world or from Amazon, take your guffed HDD out of the laptop and connect it to a working laptop, see if you can recover the files that way.  I've managed to do it before. I think the cradles are only about 20 quid ish. 

[Sho'Time]

I honestly wouldn't know where to start to do that tbh. I'm not sure if they've already tried that - I would hope so, but I feel like they'll always do whatever just gets them the most money.

[neesy111]

See if you can start it in safe mode, what model and make is the laptop...google the issue and you might find that its a common problem with that model or make and find a solution from a tech forum.  Is it under warranty ?

Try taking the battery out and connecting the AC, sounds weird but we had some HP laptops a few years back which would wouldn't boot properly then we just happened to remove the battery with AC connected and it fired up ok. 

Is it windows 10, 8 or 7...or XP?

It's a HP, Windows 7.

Do you have another machine in the house, a PC or a laptop?

I've got a Mac and a work laptop.

Buy one of those USB SSD or HDD cradles from PC world or from Amazon, take your guffed HDD out of the laptop and connect it to a working laptop, see if you can recover the files that way.  I've managed to do it before. I think the cradles are only about 20 quid ish. 

You buy them off amazon for £5 for a laptop HDD.