IDE Error and pxe-e61 media test failure

A friend's nephew pulled his laptop off of a table, and it fell to the floor. Now he can no longer boot.. He receives the following error messages:

IDE #0 Error
PXE-E61 Media Test Failure

I tried to get into the bios and/or boot in safe mode to no avail. Could his hard drive have been damaged, or is there anything else I can try?

Thanks,

hcrawfor

 

The second error PXE-E61 Media Test Failure is probably followed by "check cable" and this is being caused by the first error. This PXE error comes up because the PC is trying to boot to the hard drive and is unable to (we'll talk about this in a minute), it then tries booting from the CD nad if no disc is there it will go to the final boot device which is the network. That is what 'check cable' means: check the network cable. IDE #0 means that the PC is unable to boot from IDE device zero, which is the hard drive. The hard drive appears to have crashed, but you should be able to get into the BIOS to see if the BIOS recognizes the drive. The moment the PC powers on, start pressing Del or F2 or whatever the key is to get into the BIOS. You can also try booting to a 'live' CD like Knoppix (which is Linux that runs entirely from the CD) or the UBCD4Win (which is more-or-less Windows that runs entirely from the CD). Both are free. You can download the UBCD4Win from here:
http://majorgeeks.com/UBCD4Win_d5710.html
and the info on how to build the disc is here:
http://www.ubcd4win.com/howto.htm
and you can download the Knoppix ISO image from here:
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html
You can boot to one of these CDs and try to repair your HD or at least try to save some data. If you're trying to save data, hook up an external drive BEFORE booting to the disc of your choice.

Good luck!