HP 625 laptop hard disc not recognized suddenly

[rgvkid]

hi all,

i have an hp 625 laptop which ive had for a month or so running windows 7 pro.went to power it up yesterday (working perfectly the night before,powered down properly etc.) and no joy 8 (

it says "non system disc or disc error" when i try to start.
also used hp's own tools (escape key at startup) and it didnt come up with any errors (despite lengthy hard disc scan)


if i use my windows recovery disc which came with it,it gets as far as setup and asking where you want to install windows,but no hard disc shows up !! so it wont install to a disc it cant see.

so cant even get windows to boot up to get my stuff off etc.

any help much appreciated,

cheers,

col

 

[Tmagic650]

Check the laptops bios and make sure the hard drive is seen there and set as the boot device. If you don't see the drive in the bios, the hard drive is bad. You may still be able to get your data off the old drive as long as you don't format it. It is best to remove the hard drive, install a new drive and set the old drive in an external USB enclosure and try to access it. The laptop is still under warranty so HP might supply you with a new OS preloaded drive

 

[rgvkid]

hi,
thanks for that.it all seemed to be fine settings-wise, but still no joy.
i also had an xp disc which came with the laptop , and when installing that it found a 30 gig partition (think this is an HP backup section), so installed xp there. the theory being if i could get an OS on it,then i could hopefully make it work, and right enough the rest of the hard disc showed up in disc manager, so was able to create partitions and format it (still no idea at all why it would do this when it was working fine).
so am currently installing windows 7 again, fingers crossed.
re: content,there was nothing that important, i will try to use a couple of file recovery programs when it is back up and running, but dont know how successful they will be.
cheers,
col