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.

Find more posts tagged with

Free for TechExams community: Cybersecurity salary guide

Compare cert salaries and plan your next career move

Button

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.