So the Dell Laptop died

[wife]

something about not being able to find the boot something or another. Geek brother told me that I needed the reinstall disk (yeah, where is that thing)... so do I have any other options.. or should I tear the house apart?http://www.smiley-channel.de/grafiken/smiley/technik/smiley-channel.de_technik014.gif

I love my mac....http://www.macinacs.de/smile/yaibo46x27.gif

[Buzzardhut]

Could be a bad hard drive

[wife]

Could be a bad hard drive

I wouldn't doubt that. Our last one had a bad hard drive... when will I learn???

[Kung]

I'd boot into the BIOS, and see if it notices the hard drive.

[wife]

I'd boot into the BIOS, and see if it notices the hard drive.

can you expound on that a little???? I remember doing it once before

[Buzzardhut]

can you expound on that a little???? I remember doing it once before
The bios might see the hard drive but the boot files might be in bad sectors

[jeffrebferren]

My HP Laptop died over the weekend. Blue screen of death for a fraction of a second and then reboot to options of safe mode, last known good, etc... nothing worked... just kept doing that cycle. So, I had to reload..... it didn't come with any discs but had a recovery partition...... I just started hitting "F" keys while booting up and finally found that F11 took me to the option to reload from the recovery.... it erased everything I had before the crash, but was back up within about 3 hours.... maybe that will work for you.

[Buzzardhut]

My HP Laptop died over the weekend. Blue screen of death for a fraction of a second and then reboot to options of safe mode, last known good, etc... nothing worked... just kept doing that cycle. So, I had to reload..... it didn't come with any discs but had a recovery partition...... I just started hitting "F" keys while booting up and finally found that F11 took me to the option to reload from the recovery.... it erased everything I had before the crash, but was back up within about 3 hours.... maybe that will work for you.Unfortunately, the recovery system will erase all your files and restore back to original setup.
Make a separate partition for files you want to keep or just keep them backed up on a USB external drive.

[Pacman]

Get a USB drive caddy (they're cheap) and try hooking the drive up to a different computer. You might still be able to recover some of your data even if you can't boot from it.

[wife]

The bios might see the hard drive but the boot files might be in bad sectors

I mean....how do I do that????