Noise; Screen Freeze;Failure to Boot

macgrub

Hi,
I was working on my laptop this morning (ironically, I was backing up important college documents to a memory stick) when I started to hear a strange noise emitting from the underside of my laptop. While it's difficult to recreate the noise, it was a beep..click..click...beep . The 'beep' was rather hard to hear, but it was very unusual (as I would recognise the normal sounds from my machine).
I powered off the machine, re-booted it and went into bios. The HD was showing up.
I powered off and on the machine again. I let it load (like it normally does) but after about two minutes, I was met with the message:

"Intel UNDI, PXE-2.1 (build 082)
Copy Right (C) 1997-2008 Intel Corporation

This product is covered by one of more of the following patents...(it lists a load of numbers)

Real Tek PC1 Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller Series v2.26 (090219)
PXE-E61 Media Test Failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Existing PXE Rom
Operating System not found"

This message remains stationary until I power off the machine.

I'm guessing it's the HD, but I'd like a second opinion.
Any ideas? (thanks in advance)

yoyo

Sounds like hard disk failure! I do hope you got the stuff backed up in time

Nick

macgrub

yoyo wrote: »

Sounds like hard disk failure! I do hope you got the stuff backed up in time

Nick

Thanks for the reply!
Yeah. I got the stuff backed up, but I keep all important stuff backed up on cloud servers anyway.
My laptop says (said ) showed up two Harddrives in the 'My Computer' folder: the main (C) and a secondary (D) drive. Would these be separate drives or partitioned?

yoyo

macgrub wrote: »

Thanks for the reply!
Yeah. I got the stuff backed up, but I keep all important stuff backed up on cloud servers anyway.
My laptop says (said ) showed up two Harddrives in the 'My Computer' folder: the main (C) and a secondary (D) drive. Would these be separate drives or partitioned?

That's normal. Generally OEMs partition the drives so you have a system partition and a "Data" one. It could also be showing a hidden system recovery partition accidentally. Definitely back up while you can, clicking and mechanical beeping from a hard disk are classic signs of a failing one

Nick

macgrub

yoyo wrote: »

That's normal. Generally OEMs partition the drives so you have a system partition and a "Data" one. It could also be showing a hidden system recovery partition accidentally. Definitely back up while you can, clicking and mechanical beeping from a hard disk are classic signs of a failing one

Nick

Thanks Nick.
I can't backup anything now It won't start.
Does this mean both 'C' and 'D' partitions are probably busted?

yoyo

macgrub wrote: »

Thanks Nick.
I can't backup anything now It won't start.
Does this mean both 'C' and 'D' partitions are probably busted?

The best option you can do right now is to remove the hard disk from the machine and try to access it via another working machine. Depending on the damage you may or may not be able to recover any more data. Professional data recovery is very expensive, and even then may not be able to recover the data.
You can get Hard Disk caddies which you can mount the broken hard disk in and connect via USB. You may be able to access it long enough to recover some/the rest of the data

Nick

macgrub

yoyo wrote: »

The best option you can do right now is to remove the hard disk from the machine and try to access it via another working machine. Depending on the damage you may or may not be able to recover any more data. Professional data recovery is very expensive, and even then may not be able to recover the data.
You can get Hard Disk caddies which you can mount the broken hard disk in and connect via USB. You may be able to access it long enough to recover some/the rest of the data

Nick

Thanks again.
I've no way of doing this, but I'll call on someone who can.