Thetownend.com

Sadly my desktop PC has died. No great drama, it has power and the fan runs but it refuses to POST or run BIOS. So that seems pretty terminal then. :(

But there are lots of files on it that I need to use - and pretty soon. So I'm going to need to pay someone to get the files off the hopefully undamaged hard drive. So the question at the end of this is how long should that take and how much should that cost, approx?

Any help would be greatful recieved.

I know it's dumb but and I should just plug the drive into another PC as a slave but I don't have another PC or the skills that pay these particular bills. That is if it still works.

As for the drive, I'll get the rest of the data off ater but I've got a feck load of work that needs to be in on Monday and it is all sat on that drive taunting me with its completeness.

Have you made any changes to the PC recently, installed any new hardware?

No, nothing. It worked on Monday, shut down properly but on Tuesday there was nothing.

Nothing apart from me running round the room, smashing myself in the head and going WAAAAAGH!

You could try resetting the CMOS. If you look on the motherboard there'll be a little battery, like a watch battery.

There'll be a jumper next to it which will be 2 or 3 pins, just cross the pins (so they touch) power on the pc, power down, uncross the jumper and power up again.

Or, just take the CMOS battery out but that can be slow and can take upwards of 30 minutes to reset.

do you have an external hard drive? if so, get yourself a caddy and plug it in - t'will transfer everything over to the external hdd.

will probably work out considerably cheaper than paying someone to do it as well

I don't have an external drive. Argh...

Okay so I can't identify the jumper (I'm a fool yes but ) but I've removed the CMOS battery so I'll give it a while and then try again. I take it that this clears the CMOS settings - eventually - and then I put it back (?) and try to boot? Gulp.

Yep, just leave the battery out for 30 minutes or so and then put it back and boot up. It just resets your BIOS to default settings.

Cheers Mr Gray and Mr Youth.

I know that people like me probably shouldn't be allowed PCs...

did it work??? I sat here desperately waiting for the latest riveting installment! :mrgreen:

Oh man you is bored! This is my PC and even I'm not that interested.  
 
No, it didn't work but probably did it wrong. Or something else more serious happened. Well, being old it would have died soon anyway.

Luckily I found a trained monkey who is right now extracting the data for me for a few quid. So if he can, I will get all my bongo back and I'll probably be back on here at some point bugging these guys for advice on what to get to replace it.

Did I say bongo? I mean serious grown up work documents.

You could always try taking it back to basic's, unplug any addition hardware you have installed, unplug HDD, and then plug other items in 1 by 1 to try and determine where the problem lies.

Failing that I'll still got a P4 1.6mhz pc for sale if you want something not new and cheap (keep forgetting to put it on ebay to try and sell it)  :wink: