Hard disk crashed!! What should I do??

Question

I have this 4-5 year old Dell desktop and when I try to turn it on, a black screen comes up and it says that the boot volume is too big and I can't turn it on. I always have to restart it, but the same screens keep on coming up! There's always a black screen with a loading bar at the bottom and then a blue screen that tells you to restart. A computer guy says that the hard disk could be gone but I have all my important stuff on that computer like pictures. What should I do?

Answer 1

Sounds like a bad hard drive - but do not worry - you can save the data! Purchase a new hard drive (Tiger Direct.com is a great, low cost place). Install the new hard drive as the Master - install Windows on it (I assume you have a legit copy). Install the bad hard drive as the slave - Windows will see this as a storage device and then you can pull all of your files off of it.

Answer 2

Boot from the Windows CD and choose the repair option, then remove the CD and try to boot. You can also try to boot into safe mode and try to figure out what is wrong from there. If worse comes to worse you can install a new hard drive and install Windows on it. Then you put the bad hard drive in the computer as well and copy what you need from it to your new hard drive.

Answer 3

Take the hard drive out of your computer, and take it to a friend's computer.

With the computer off, unplug the wide ribbon cable and the power cable from the CD drive on the friend's computer. Plug your hard drive in the place of the CD drive.

Boot the PC. If the hard drive is still readable, it will show up on your friends computer as an additional hard drive (look in the My Computer icon). If you can see the hard drive, copy the files you need off of the drive.

Answer 4

PANIC
then call customer service

Answer 5

backup all your data in the future, that way you don't need to worry about losing your data in the future....