laptop not recognising hard disk?

cactus jack

hi all,
sorry if this is in the wrong section but always get confused with this part of the boards site. recently i removed a trojan from my compaq cq61 laptop using avast. upon rebooting the laptop it now suddenly is having problems starting up & just goes through a cycle till it leaves a message on a black screen that the hard disk does not exist. while i've tried multiple restarts & even removing the ram & hard disk the same problem persists. the only thing i'm able to do on the laptop is go into a command prompt screen which i'm led to by the compaq back up program but am clueless what to do here. is there an easy fix [or any fix for that matter] for this?

D'Agger

Just a few questions:

Before you removed the virus did you make a system backup/resotre point?

Have you backed up your files?

Are you able to start the PC in safe mode? (normally press f8 a number of times while the PC boots brings you to where you can select this option)

cactus jack

made a restore point but no option to go into it. after every 3rd to 4th restart i'm given the option of start normally or check files with neither proving fruitful. unable to go into system set up at the beginning by pressing 'esc'. like the fool i am i didn't back up my files. will try the safe mode access via f8 but don't think it will allow me into it

cactus jack

unable to go into safe mode. there's an option to 'launch startup repair' which does nothing. then there's start normally which loads up to the windows 7 icon & then grounds to a halt which eventually goes to a black screen with a message of boot device not found.

D'Agger

cactus jack wrote: »

unable to go into safe mode. there's an option to 'launch startup repair' which does nothing. then there's start normally which loads up to the windows 7 icon & then grounds to a halt which eventually goes to a black screen with a message of boot device not found.

What I would normally do here is just format the laptop and reinstall the OS but I get the feeling you haven't prepared for that (no offence intended)

I'm sure other people on the forum could recommend programs that may allow you to turn around the situation and allow you to maybe get back your OS but to me it sounds like your OS is corrupted. Spotmau is the only program I would suggest - you can install it onto a USB device, on a separate PC obviously, then try boot to the usb when you startup the broken PC - you can repair windows installations with it and do a large amount of other tweaks.


One last thing would be to pop in the recovery CD and see if you can boot to that but I'm not too sure how well that'll work.

ronoc75

If your laptop does not recognise the hard disk then it's most likely that the hard disk has failed. In this case a reinstall will not work, you will need to replace the hard drive and then reinstall windows.

D'Agger

ronoc75 wrote: »

If your laptop does not recognise the hard disk then it's most likely that the hard disk has failed. In this case a reinstall will not work, you will need to replace the hard drive and then reinstall windows.

That said it's obv worth trying a reinstall to make fully sure before shelling out on a new HDD