I was browsing the forums this morning and my laptop just completely froze solid. I turned it off, then restarted it and it took me almost 2hrs to get it booted back up, during which time it was doing the following: (Compaq Presario CQ61) 1: The WiFi button next to the power button which is normally blue, turned a glaring shade of red. 2: Windows would attempt to start, then go into a crash dump 3: During the next restart a screen popped up that said one of my discs needed to be configured, so I let it run, then the screen just stayed black with a bunch of computer jargon on it and went no further. 4.) Black screen with just a cursor and wouldn't go further about 5-6 times. Any ideas what could be wrong? Right before this happened, I started a Compaq recover disc. Could I have inadvertently given myself a virus or fried my HD, maybe?
Something similar happened with my dad's laptop. In his case it was a hardware problem (one of the memory sticks went bad), but I was told that a software issue can also cause this problem. Do you know anyone close to where you live who knows anything about computers? That would be your best bet because these things are best solved in person.
To test if it is the software (virus) or hardware, try starting you computer in safe mode. My PC got a malware infection a couple years ago and this is how I get files off of it for my Mac which I bought rather than cleaning my old hard drive. That's all I can offer you without going to my son for help.
One of the guys I used to work with physically damaged his hard drive somehow and needed to recover a bunch of files. I think the estimate he got on that was over $1000. So it can get expensive. Hopefully your problem is a software problem with a simple fix. That's basically all the help I can offer. I know my roommate knows a bunch about computers. Maybe I can ask him.
If you have access to another computer where you can burn a CD or DVD, you could burn a Linux distribution onto one and try to boot that from the CD. If it is a software issue and not a hardware issue, it should work. Also, if you can boot into the Linux distribution, you should be able to recover files from your hard drive as well.
It's booted now (the funky one is the one I'm on at the moment) but now I'm terrified to turn it off. I'm probably gonna have to get a new one. The guy I talked to said it was a possible motherboard issue and that it would be around $450-500 to repair it. That's more than this machine is even worth.
Ah. If you can find out the exact motherboard, you can probably get it cheap online. They're simple to replace, but with a laptop it might be a pain in the ass to get everything apart so you can do it.
