• We hope you have a fantastic holiday season to close out 2025! Thank you all so much for being part of the Tom's Guide community!

Need URGENT help! Laptop will not boot from HDD or CD!!

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Guide community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

reaper2794

Distinguished
Sep 6, 2010
50
0
18,580
Hey guys, I really need some MAJOR help here. Right now Im using Ubuntu, it works for some reason I have it on a CD, but I need my files and I cant access my HDD.

I dont know what happened.

I was uninstalling iTunes, and then my computer randomly blue screened and shut off.

Whenever I reboot it, it tells me to either start normally or repair (Im using Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit) and if I start normally, it cant start so it goes to repair, and if I click repair, it just sits at repair

When I try to boot from CD, it does the same thing when I have the Windows 7 CD popped in

I cannot access my HDD from Ubuntu, it shows this:

xli80p.png


I dont know if you guys can make anything out of that, please feel free to gimme suggestions and ask questions, I REALLY just wanna get Windows 7 back on here working, I have a backup on an external HD and Id use that but like I said I cant boot from the CD so I dont think its an option

Your help is GREATLY appreciate, I have a lot of homework to do and my life revolves around the computer for my schoolwork, I really need this guys

Thank you
 
tell me what mode is your hard drive in:is it SATA or IDE or maybe something else?
oh and give a try formatting full this time.
good luck.
Marios
 
How do you format fully though? I did format C: in MS-DOS, isn't that a full format?

I read that format C: /Q is a quick format, I didn't do that

It's a SATA hard drive so I'm guessing it'd be SATA, I don't think the BIOS would magically change. I'm pretty sure some part of the hard drive is corrupt. What I am trying to understand is this. If the hard drive is corrupt, does this mean it is BROKEN, or does it mean it is FIXABLE?

Please tell me how to do a "full format"
 
corrupt means corrupted data in the hard drive.broken means broken physical parts inside.i do not know a lot about ms-dos,so i cannot help much on that matter.
Marios
 
I see. So I guess the enclosure is the way to go.

So I remove the HDD, plug it in to the enclosure, go to computer management, disk management, delete all partitions, format the partition, and then put back into laptop and install W7.