blue screen of death/boot sector issues

[von's girl]

Ok, I'm in big trouble. My laptop crashed a couple of weeks ago, and it's dead, dead, dead. I have talked to a few people about it, and it is the general consensus that my c drive is no more.
Mostly, when I try to start it, it says "Operating system not found." I have been able to get into a DOS view, and it does not even acknowledge that I have a C drive.
I have poked around a bit in the BIOS, and for a bit, I was able to get the windows screen to pop up momentarily, but the blue screen of death pops up and it eventually decides that the OS is, in fact, not found.
My question is this: Is it possible to find some manner of XP boot software that will just try to boot the computer up without losing my data. I have a ton of pictures and files for work that I did not back up. I just need to see if there is a way to get to those files and move them somewhere else. I am on a wireless network (or was, when the computer was working), and could transfer that way or through a jump drive or a memory stick or cd...anything - if I could just get to the files. Any suggestions?

 

[Hangman]

Sounds like the hard drive may be dead.
OK, if you are feeling a little techy, here's a job for you. If not, you may have to hire someone. Here's a trick I learned while having the same problem once.
You need to take the hard drive out of the laptop. It will be encased in some metal or plastic bezel. You need to take this bezel apart so you have the hard drive itself. Now most laptop manufacturers create their own bezels to coincide with their laptops. But the hard drive itself will have a regular ribbon plug on it, as well as the 4 pin power plug and the jumper pins. Very similar to a desktop HD.
Once you have this out of it's bezel, put it in the freezer. Leave it in there for a good 2 hours.
Get another PC (desktop preferably) ready to plug in the laptop HD as a slave. Once you pull the hard drive out of the freezer, you will have only once chance & not very much time to get the files transferred over to the other machine, so make sure you have everything else ready for the transfer.

Most of the time this trick works. Every now and then though, the drive is so far gone, you won't be able to do much of anything except hire the professionals to tear the drive apart and manually extract the data from the platters of the drive.

Good luck,