Hey everyone, I am having trouble with my laptop, as I believe the HDD is damaged. Recently, it wasn't running well, so I shut it down, and when I went to restart, it would go to the "Windows is loading files..." screen and the bar would stop at about 1/3 of the way through.
Every time I go to start it up now, it does that, and I can't get past that part of the loading process in order to do anything else. I did hit ESC to get a list of options immediately after powering on and was able to do a hard disk test. It informed me the "Quick Test is Executing", and when it got to 19% complete, I got this message in red text: "#10008 - Replace Hard Disk 1".
So, I am a broke college student and obviously have a dilemma here. I really want to recover the data from my hard drive, first and foremost. However, I don't want to have to pay someone else to do it, if possible. Are there programs (free ones) that I can burn onto a CD or DVD, then boot from the DVD/CD drive and recover my data? I do have an external hard drive where I could move data to, if that is possible.
Also, I of course would like to have a working laptop again, though definitely not at the peril of my data that I want to recover. Is there a possibility that there is just a messed up connection or that there is a simple repair step I can try to get my computer up and running again? If not, and if there is no way to inexpensively recover my data, what should I do?
Any help would really be appreciated. Thanks in advance!
