Desktop

First can the drive in the laptop be detected in the bios? You can purchase an adapter to hook it up to a pc also.

http://www.baber.com/drives/internal_hard_drives/laptops/conversionkit.htm

That way you won't lose any data if the drive is still even available to the system.

Try booting from a CD that will read an NTFS drive. Here's link that you need:

http://www.ntfs.com/boot-disk.htm

If you cannot "see" drive, it might be dead. However, to be sure, remove it and connect to an XP or 2000 PC using adapter referred to in first answer.

If drive is dead, there are those who recover data from failed drives. As long as platters are intact, success is virtually guaranteed. Usually starts at about $800.00. Then they can determine just how valuable data is.

Dalton

Are you sure that the original messages were not caused by a virus? Boot to the XP CD and go into Rocovery Console. Once there, run FIXMBR to fix the Master Boot Record. This should fix problems relating to a hard drive not being found. If it is the Operating System that is missing try FIXBOOT while in the Recovery Console.Of course both these options assume that the hard disk is accessible. Is it visible in the bios? Can you hear it spinup when the machine is turned on? If you cannot hear it spinup then it could either mean that a power cable has become unseated or in the worst case it has died.

I would question the 2 messages that the user received as being suspicious of a boot sector virus. Try repairing the MBR and the Boot Sector first.

Good luck,

RW

first ur enter the bios setup
then detect the harddisk in bios
save the settings and exit
then system will restart
if the hard disk contain correct os it will run properly.otherwise plz reinstall the os if u have

If you are willing to save the data on the harddisk, use the windows xp cd to boot and
select recorovery console from the setup
wizard, select the OS from the installed onces
shown in the list, make sure you have the admin
password to login, once the password is verified
you will be able to access the drive, move the
data from your existing partition (most of time c:) to new partition d:
In this way your data will be always safe even
if you go for formating the system.

Sounds like the *.ini file got deleted by the virus. Have run into this before. I just nuked the damn thing.