Help - Boot Disc Failure

[Erica]

Hi!
I'm new to this, and am so frustrated with my computer that I'm about to take a bat to it in honor of "Office Space"... Here's whats going on...

My computer froze yesterday, so I cold booted it. I went to turn it on today and it said 'boot disc failure insert insert system disc and press enter'

Well, I tried that and did some research and I went into BIOS (whatever that is) and changed it to boot from the CD. The catch is, it doesn't even recognize the CD! No hard drive, no cd, nothing.

My thesis is on this computer (not backed up..I'm so dumb!), and I really think that this is payback for something I may have done wrong in a former

Please help!!
Thanks
Erica

 

[Tekkaraiden]

Depending on the ago of the computer the hard drive might be failing. If you know anyone with a computer you should be able to attach the hard drive to their computer and recover your thesis. All else fails you could take it to a local computer repair shop and they should be able to tell you exactly what is wrong. Just make sure they can retrieve the files you want.

While I'm thinking about it, in the bios the boot should be set to a hard drive and not the floppy or cd.

 

[Erica]

Ok, so I changed the boot drive to CD-ROM because thats what all the other forums said to do.

How do I hook up a hard drive to my computer...I thought all my files were on my hard drive...

 

[SNGX1275]

Dude above me hit the nail on the head. Try and get that drive to another computer, AT WORST it was a time consuming effort, at best it has a chance of getting important data off of it.

I'm a pretty expierenced grad student, and I know this is 'too late' to tell you, but you really really need multiple places to store important stuff. Personally (and I have no ties to them other than I use and like) something like www.getdropbox.com is fantastic. 2 gigs of storage, and you can have a common copy between multiple computers, plus a copy online, and access to past revisions of that file. I know it sounds like I'm pushing them, and I guess I am, I think they are invite only, if you want an invite I can give one to you, but really, this is just a suggestion. Buying a cheap flash drive and copying everything to that every time works just as good.

 

[Erica]

Well-
All is not lost. I have copies of my paper saved to gmail accounts and to my flashdrive, but its just not the most updated version. I should only take a couple hours to get what I lost back, but I still need to get my pictures and music and stuff off....

 

[Spyder_1386]

hey Erica

You could try Chkdsk by using the Windows Repair function on the Windows CD. It might be able to repair corrupted files(if this is the problem) and allow the HD to boot up ....

Spyder_1386