Help! I think I broke my Mother-in-Law's Laptop!

alespringalespring
edited February 2005 in Hardware
Someone please help.

Here's what happened, I slammed the top down pretty hard on the laptop (not going to get into the story!) and now the laptop won't start. It is a 2 or 3 year old Dell comparable to the Inspiron 9200 that you can buy on their website today.

When I slammed it down I heard a fizzing shutting down noise and then it turned off. When my husband tried to restart it, he got a message stating that he needed to reinstall the Windows startup disc.

He is pretty certain that I broke something inside of the laptop. Can this be fixed? Oh, and we were trying to fix the CD burner the day before this to burn a backup file, and we couldn't fix it, so have we lost everything?


thanks for your help,
the worst daughter-in-law ever

Comments

  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited February 2005
    honestly, it doesn't sound good. You probably did fry something inside. Is it still under warranty?

    if not, you may be apologizing to your mom-in-law by buying her a new laptop :(

    The good news is, if you DID "fry" something, at least the data on the hard drive MIGHT still be good - unless you jarred it so badly that the hard drive head physically touched the disk (a head crash), which may have gouged the disk, ruining any data on it.

    So, the laptop starts, right? If so, you may only need to buy a new hard drive. Either way, it sounds like the data is probably shot.

    Ahhhh mothers-in-law.... I can only imagine the story behind this one... :p
  • madmatmadmat
    edited February 2005
    I have to agree with Prime, sounds like a head crash to me. I just wanted to chime in though because on the front page I saw this in the new threads and it made me laugh, all you see there is "Help! I think I broke my Mother-in-law..." which is probably something we've all wanted to do at least once... ;D
  • alespringalespring
    edited February 2005
    Hah!
    That's funny!

    Thanks for making me laugh through my tears.

    Thanks for the advice. We have a computer-genius friend who is going to take a look at it. Hopefully it's the hard drive.
  • edcentricedcentric near Milwaukee, Wisconsin Icrontian
    edited February 2005
    It may be system files that aer damaged. It might still be possible to remove the hdd and install it as a slave on another machine and recover some files.
    Good luck.
    Mat, I saw the same thing. Still laughing.
  • GrayFoxGrayFox /dev/urandom Member
    edited February 2005
    If the harddrive has died in it u will need to replace it and reinstall windows.
    *If u dont hear a spinning sound the harddrives probably dead* .
  • soupie21soupie21
    edited February 2005
    Hi,
    It is possible that the hardrive IDE cable has became loose. do you see the hardrive listed in the BIOS?
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