Laptop wont start

[hyg71886]

Hi everyone, I have a hp laptop and its posting the following message

For Realtek RTL8139(x)/8130/810X PCI
Fast Ethernet Controller v2.13 (020326)
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-: Exiting PXE ROM.

Does anyone know what this means and how to fix it? I need my hw off it and its due tomorrow.

[glc]

Your hard drive probably died. You do have your homework backed up, right?

[hyg71886]

wow, any way to recover?

[glc]

Maybe, but probably not. The reason you are getting that message is it can't find a bootable device and it's defaulting to trying to boot from a network.

There are a few things you can try. You can try to boot it with something like the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows or a Linux live CD that can read NTFS, and if you can access the drive you can rescue your files to a USB flash drive. Another option is remove the hard drive from the laptop and connect it to another working computer and see if you can access it. If it's a SATA drive, you can drop it right into a computer that's SATA-compatible, or you can use a USB adapter. If it's IDE, you can use a notebook IDE adapter to connect it inside a computer that has IDE, or use a USB adapter.

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?inv...20-OTB&cat=HDD
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=HD-108&cat=HDD

[Masaki 7-11]

I would go into the bios first and make sure that it's trying to boot from the hard drive first; I had a similar problem once with an older HP laptop and it wouldn't load up the OS. I went into the BIOS and noticed that for some reason it got set to boot from the network instead, changed it back to boot from the hard drive and haven't had any problems with that computer since.

[glc]

Wouldn't it proceed to the next device in the list if it failed to boot from the network?