My Computer Maybe Dieing!, =[ Options

[lkajsfklajskds]

Yesterday, me and my sister were watching some movies on my laptop. And then the whole thing froze. We did the natural thing:
CtrlAltDelete.

But the thing never came up. And i have a vista so the computer never turned blue first. Nothing seemed to work. So..
We just pressed the off button and it turned off.

And, ofcourse, we turned it back on. But i say that in the weakest of sense, because it didnt exactly turn on.

We pressed the button TO turn it on, but a screen came up that said:
"There as been a disk read error. Please press CtrlAltDelete"

My first thought was "Well, atleast my computers not dead"
So, we pressed CtrlAltDelete
The computer "restarted" but instead of fully restarting, it went back to that screen.
We even let the battery run out and tried it again but it didnt work =[

AAHHHHH, we could never turn on the computer!

DOES ANYBODY KNOW WHATS GOING ON?!
I DO NOT WANT TO REBOOT THE COMPUTER!!

(In case you're wodnering, i'm usig my sisters laptop. THANK GOD she's here for the week)

[tokyo-rose]

You mean you don't want to reformat the computer?

Google the situation your laptop is in, or go to a Vista website and look at their troubleshooting section to see if it's addressed there.

[lkajsfklajskds]

^thanks for replying

im talking with dell technical support.

[tokyo-rose]

All right, I hope they can tell you what's wrong and how to fix it.

[illriginal]

Yesterday, me and my sister were watching some movies on my laptop. And then the whole thing froze. We did the natural thing:
CtrlAltDelete.

But the thing never came up. And i have a vista so the computer never turned blue first. Nothing seemed to work. So..
We just pressed the off button and it turned off.

And, ofcourse, we turned it back on. But i say that in the weakest of sense, because it didnt exactly turn on.

We pressed the button TO turn it on, but a screen came up that said:
"There as been a disk read error. Please press CtrlAltDelete"

My first thought was "Well, atleast my computers not dead"
So, we pressed CtrlAltDelete
The computer "restarted" but instead of fully restarting, it went back to that screen.
We even let the battery run out and tried it again but it didnt work =[

AAHHHHH, we could never turn on the computer!

DOES ANYBODY KNOW WHATS GOING ON?!
I DO NOT WANT TO REBOOT THE COMPUTER!!

(In case you're wodnering, i'm usig my sisters laptop. THANK GOD she's here for the week)

Uh... shit I wish I could tell you something. The issue you're havin has to do with your video card. Keep in mind that Windows Vista is still really buggy. So the typical things you can do on XP you can't do on Vista until the service packs come out for Vista. Right now Vista is highly unreliable.

[lkajsfklajskds]

^thanks, but what do you think i can do?

the computer tech dude told me to do a bunch of stuff that didnt even work.
then he said he would send us windows vista cd and we could install it again.

[illriginal]

^thanks, but what do you think i can do?

the computer tech dude told me to do a bunch of stuff that didnt even work.
then he said he would send us windows vista cd and we could install it again.

Yeah that actually sucks... if you bought the laptop, you could just re-install the disc(s) that came with your machine.

Also keep in mind, if it does hold true that it's a "disk error" then it's your hard drive. But like I said, Vista is unreliable who it'll throw fake errors and act like there's actual errors.

Try this, turn your machine on, and quickly hit delete. This should give you access to your BIOS. Try to find "Master/Primary Hard Disk or HDD"

If you thoroughly searched for it and found it, it'll say Western or SONY or Seagate etc... and show the size such as 10gb or 200gb or 10,000mb/200,000mb

If not... then it could be that your Hard Disk died or might have some how got unplugged from the motherboard. And that's why you're getting that specific error.

If it's not hardware, then it goes into the software end. Could have been caused by a virus or deletion/modification of a system file or registry setting. Basically the operating system became corrupted.

[Just_Dream]

Oh man, that's Dell for you. Seriously, I got sent to Technical Support (eh, go to my customer care thread if you want details) and they were like "Okay well have you gone to Control Panel? Okay does it say you only have 1 graphics card? Are you sure it only says 1? Alright well I can't really do much for you". .... I think that with the computer that we had, we would KNOW that our computer has and does not have. They usually ask you dumb questions "have you tried restarting?" even if you tell them that you've restarted it before.

It might be the graphics card -- as tamacracker said -- because mines died on me before and it started lagging and then the computer would always take me to this black screen and augh. D:

[yaamakoh]

faulty ram could prevent bootup too. in bios check your ram settings as well.
i talked to the head support manager for dell in india, and i didn't want to. all i wanted was the stupid button you press to initiate the hidden partition to reinstall windows, but that bastard wouldn't tell me. he said the computer wasn't mine, even though i told him i was a family tech attempting to fix it. i told him i didn't want to reformat through my own cd and download the drivers seperately when i know i could do everything with one push of a button via hidden partition. then he put me on the line with the head manager when i didn't ask, and before i could speak he asked me how his assistant was? i said he sucked dick, then hung up.
i swear, they should fire all the dell techs in india since they're worthless. sprint fired all their international techs after many complaints for bad customer support, now their business is rising.
dell should do the same if they want their spot back at #1, those bastards.

OH YEAH! you didn't ask that stupid tech for the system restore button did you? instead of them sending you a cd, i know on new dell laptops you can press one button when the computer boots up to fully reinstall everything automatically accessing the hidden partition.