Is it still under warranty? If so, call the manufacturer or retailer and talk to them first. If not ...

Laptops are a lot more difficult to fiddle with. There is a chance your hard drive has gone bad. Do you have a bootable floppy/cd/dvd drive? If so, you could boot up that way and then look for more details. Otherwise, your best bet is to take it somewhere you trust to have it checked out.

This probably isn't it, but it might be worth taking apart the laptop and making sure the hard drive is... like, still attached and stuff. If it's just loose somehow, you might be able to get it fixed that way.

More likely, though, you might need a new hard drive.

shite i was worried it was probably something like that, cheers for the advice guys, do hard drives normally just fail like that?its long out of warranty

Well, hard drives are where a lot of the moving parts in computers are (even after pretty much everything else has just come down to electrons moving over transistors and stuff like that), so you're bound to have a mechanical failure eventually, no?

true its just happened so randomly

It'd definitely be a hardware problem :-(

shite cheers mate

Hard drives are the most common part on a computer to fail, I believe, followed by power supplies and floppy disks... Although solid-state drives (which have no moving parts) are starting to come onto the market and I expect will replace spinning platter drives on laptops within a few years.

isnt the most common problem with laptops overheating (and causing damage to hardware) due to fan performance waining ? toshiba laptops hve a bad rep for that anyway.

I used to work for a University's computer center, helping monitor the network and getting staff set up with computers, and in my experience Tolstoy is absolutely right. Hard drives are most likely to die, then power supplies. Next tends to be between RAM/fans/drives. Sean, laptops overheating tends to be avoidable with proper care, though it does occur.

trim101, hate to say it, but it sounds like your HD kicked the bucket.

Nothing new to add, but some details: if you have a bootable CD bay, download and burn a linux "live cd" (ubuntu would do, but knoppix is also a common option).

In this way you can have a system running off your CD, and with a utility (under ubuntu is called "gparted" or "partition manager") you can verify what's up).

If you are lucky, it will be only a partition, but chances are that al the HD has gone wrong... Sorry.

PS: if you need to pause the game we are playing together, just tell us. I'm sure nobody would object, especially since we know you are still recovering from hospital...

Ah, I forgot to mention: if you want to try what above, you will probably have to enter the bios setup and tell the computer to boot from the CD. This is normally done by pressing "del" or "Fsomething" at the moment the computer is turning on. Normally the name of the key to be pressed appears on the display quickly in those moments...

i dont have a bootable cd bay i dont think, cheers mac its ok im using an old desktop so no need to pasue the game just was alot comfyer for me to use the laptop, aprreciate the information guys thanks