Laptop died... where can I take it?

Well, my laptop just died which sucks. First Windows froze, then I tried to reboot and after the POST nothing happened. No error message, just a black screen. Tried going into Safe Mode and halfway through starting up it froze. Since I have dual boot with Ubuntu, I tried booting into that and I got an "MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC" message and that was it. I tried disabling the APIC in the BIOS but there is no option. Then I tried appending a "noapic" option at the end of the boot sequence as was suggested in the Ubuntu forums and now when I turn it on I get three beeps and nothing. I can't even get into the BIOS.

Anyone have any suggestions where to take it? I don't want to take it to Geek Squad since those ripoff artists will charge an obscene amount of money for it. I have sensitive data on it and unless there's a way to place the internal hdd in an external laptop hdd case (are there ones?) I'm screwed.

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Comments

liven

By any chance is this an HP laptop?

Perhaps one in the dv6000 or 9000 series?

Zoomer

It's an Acer Travelmate 4400.

iowatech

http://www.mini-box.com/HDD-Cable-Adapter

or

http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=50208026

Those allow you to hook up a laptop HDD to a normal PC.
If worse comes to worse.

It probably was a dying motherboard that's now dead.

dynamik

Zoomer wrote:

I have sensitive data on it and unless there's a way to place the internal hdd in an external laptop hdd case (are there ones?) I'm screwed.

You can put it in a desktop: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812203012

pryde7

Most laptops have a reset button under. Try to locate it (if available) and do a reset.
If that works, then boot with a bootable windows cd.
Use the recovery console and run
fixmbr
fixboot then run the bootcfg to rebuild the boot.ini
If its not a bios or mainboard failure u can fix it.

dynamik

Also, find some documentation for the motherboard and see if you can determine what the three-beep code means. It might be a simple fix/replacement.