Dead laptop problem

Hi there

I wonderif any one can help me diagnose the problem with a Toshiba 1900 laptop that has become suddenly and dramatically unwell. Operating system is Windows XP Home.

I was using it online when it completely turned itself off - no shutdown warnings, no Blue Screen Of Death, nothing. Black screen within a fraction of a second.

I attempted to reboot it, and it went through the Scandisk option - the speed at which it ran through this was maybe a little slower than normal, but at the end of the scan it said everything was fine.

Then it switched to a blue screen for a fraction of a second (far too fast to read the information on it), then went back to a black screen.

It will run itself through the ScanDisk option again and again, but will either get to the blue screen and turn itself off, or just return to ScanDisk. I have tried to get the laptop to freeze on to the blue screen without success, as I'm sure that being able to read the text on it might point me towards what the problem is.

I have even tried taking a digital photo of the screen, but it switches off too quickly (I realise this sounds a little mad, but it was the only vaguely logical thing I could think of )

I have a recovery disk for the laptop, but it contains dire warnings about it removing everything from the HDD. I have a load of files and photos on there that I really don't want to lose.

I've been told that the problem could be a complete corruption of Windows XP and I need to reinstall, but of course I need to recover stuff from the HDD. I have no copy of Windows XP other than what is on the recovery disk.

Is there any way I can circumvent what is on the recovery disk to prevent it wiping the HDD, or is my only answer to try to get hold of another copy of Windows XP and reinstall it?

Or is it nothing to do with Windows at all?

Any advice would be most appreciated! If I need to get a HDD rescue done, if someone could point me towards a decent computer shop in the West Midlands who would be able to carry this out, I would be very grateful.

Cheers
Blueangel1

 

Considering the circumstances I would check the internal connections between the hard drive and the motherboard (IDE cable), remove and reseat the cable, try a new cable if possible.
Laptops are quite tricky to open and work on, so if you're not a confident harware DIYer - forget about that!

Try running HDDregenerator:

http://www.dposoft.net/

(Click the "Try" link - click "More Info" for info)

You may ultimately of course have a dying hard drive.