Computer Help and Support

A failure like this unfortunately can reflect any number of problems ... ranging from the easily fixable to a motherboard failure.

- It's probably a hard drive failure. Either the drive's built-in electronics or something physical like the disk heads crashing. The rest of the machine could be fine and "all" you need is to replace the drive (with a hard disk or a faster SSD drive) and do a restore from backups. If you can get an ear close to the drive, you should be able to hear it spin up when you turn on the machine. And then a second or two later they often make a "clunk" sound as it "seeks" (positions) the heads to go read something off the disk. One typical failure is where this first read fails, and it tries again. And again. And again. So one thing to do is to listen and see if you can hear a repeating clunk (about once or twice a second). If you hear it trying over and over again, the drive is toast. The converse is not true, you might not hear it clunking and it could still be good or bad.

- It could be a 'soft' failure of the hard drive, where it has scribbled over the information needed to boot for some tbd reason. This could be "easily" fixed by reformatting the disk and restoring from backups. The cause could have been something like a power "brown out" or spike while it was writing data to the drive. The problem with reformatting is that then you own a system with a hard drive that is of unknown quality ... it might fail again soon.

- It could be a failure of the power supply, that converts your wall power to the DC voltages needed by the motherboard and the drive. This is unlikely if it can boot to the BIOS or off of a thumb drive (e.g. boot with a stand-alone Linux on a thumb drive and just ignore the hard disk).

- It could be a failure of your motherboard .. so it's claiming that the hard disk is dead, but really it's the motherboard that has failed. Of course this is more likely if you can't boot off of something else.

- It could be bad cables between the motherboard and the hard drive. Or even cables that just aren't plugged in well (internal cables between the hard drive and the motherboard).

Most repair folks should be able to quickly narrow down what's wrong before quoting you a price to fix it. And also possibly recover some (or all) of your files off the hard drive, even if it won't boot. E.g. you might be "lucky" and the OS files are useless but your personal files might be readable.

Cloning the disk is unlikely. But it's not that hard to pull the disk out of your machine and add it as an extra disk on another computer, and then try and see how much (if any) of it can be read and copied out.

Hopefully you have good backups of anything you need. Getting data off of a failing/failed disk can be time consuming and expensive. And the cost of someone's time to look at this will quickly exceed the replacement cost of an older computer. A decent hard disk can be bought for around $100, but time charges add up quickly.