HELP Oh heylpppppp

[culturemulcher]

My lap top -you know the one with everything on it - won't turn on. It's charged, but when I press on it just gives me 3 beeps then a pause then 3 beeps.

Ive tried taking out the battery but it hasn't worked.

super-scared now.

But you won't have just left the laptop with all your stuff on and not backed it up, would you? I mean that would be silly.

When a machine fires up it goes through a set of diagnostic checks - processor, RAM, video card. It's likely that one of those has failed. If you can give us the make and model of the laptop, I can find out for you what that beep code means, although the price to you will be more sarcasm about how you should have backed up your data.

Your un-backed-up data is probably perfectly safe on the hard disk inside the laptop, even though you can't access it.

I did buy a backy uo hard drivey thing.... but hardly dare tell you thst it's still in its box . oh god. you'll never help now will you? I can see you banging your head off the wall.

okay just in case it's your day to help the hopeless. ..

its a Dell Inspiration M5010. its beeping 7 times then psusing snd beeping again.

If anyone can tell me what that means I'll love you forever.

If anyone can recommend a solid, cheap laptop to buy id love them too.

Eh, the first thing that came up when googling the model (it's an Inspiron, btw, not Inspiration) was '7 beeps'.

Example here.

It looks fixable if you want to go digging around inside your laptop. Alternatively I would be looking to someone like PC World to extract the hard disk for you and advise how to access it from another laptop.

I don't know about laptop size hardrives but I have a docking station for a full size harddrive. I bought it to transfer the data off the C drive of a desktop that died.

Paying tech guys to transfer data off probably cost the same amount as buying such a gadget, if such a gadget exist. This way, at least you have a gadget to show for your money.

thanks so much. the link was very interesting as my lap top is also about 2 years old.

Trip to oc world tomorrow to buy a new one and see if they can transfer all my docs to the new one . Thanks again. love MN

Tribpot is right, the 7 beep problem comes up immediately. Only glanced at the solutions,but it might be worth your while to follow them up.

If you don't have any luck, it's a good suggestion by MTS to get a caddy or docking station for your hard drive, and pull the data off it via another PC. Something like this:
www.maplin.co.uk/sata-usb-hard-drive-docking-station-with-hub-and-cardreader-226653

...not saying it's the best or cheapest or anything, it's just to demonstrate.

The bad news: extracting the drive from that model of laptop will take some patience. The manual(pdf link) has you unscrewing everything in sight before you get near the HDD! But it can be done.

X post - good luck, am sure they will help you out!

Thanks everyone and also for your patience reading my useless phone typing.