Laptop boot issues.

Hi again guys.
Ive been asked to look at a friends laptop that she says will not boot.
When finding out the details I was told that the laptop turned off while in use followed by the message "Operating system not found" on reboot.
I have went through some basic diagnostics, BIOS based only and Memtest.
The problem is, I booted HIRENS to absolutley no avail. It hangs on desktop load and i get just the desktop background.
However, if i remove the HDD and boot HIRENS it boots with no problem.
I dont really know whats going on, Im assuming that when booting its either hanging while trying to access the HDD , or its checking it and going into an endless retry cycle.
What do you guys think?
HDD failure?
If so it is easy to replace a HDD , but of course that means all data is lost.
There is no noise from the drive , and i am infact able to access one of the partitions which has the dell test features. Which are no use as they give you an error code to tell Dell services.
Sorry if thats confusing haha.
But any advice would be much appreciated.
Infact running hirens dos tools just now the HDD bad sector check has just come up with "Uncorrectable CRC of ECC errror on read"
Thanks.

 

A hard drive enclosure may help. They basically turn a laptop hard drive into an external hard drive that is accessible via USB. When I used this, though, it wasn't because my hard drive failed; it was because my laptop wasn't able to turn on. It may be worth a shot here if you have one available. If it is a viable option, just throw the old hard drive in an enclosure and see if you can access the data, if so than get your new hard drive and install Windows and you friend is back in business.

If you can't hear the hard drive, i.e. it's not spinning, than it is likely that the hard drive is dead, unfortunately. The enclosure option would offer you an alternative way to supply power to it so I would still consider it an option. If it is spinning, getting power, and just fails to load the OS than the enclosure should be able to get the data.

 

Yeah im gonna nip into maplins tomorrow and get a 2.5" 3.5" adapter and hook it up to my pc.
But i still cant understand why it wont boot a live cd version of XP while the HDD is in ??
Live cd's dont use the HDD and i ran without the HDD in no problems.

 

If you have access to any Linux Live CD (Ubuntu, opensuse, etc.) try one of those.

Sam