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Happy Memorial Day, Geeks!  To those of you lucky enough to still be employed in this economy – enjoy your day off, but please don’t forget the real reason for the day is to remember and pay homage to those who have served, and continue to serve our country and who defend the freedom we all enjoy.  For you Geeks in uniform, including retirees, I salute you!  Thank-you for your service and sacrifice, which many of us too often take for granted.

Q: I have what I am sure would be considered an ancient laptop Compaq Presario that I foolishly let someone borrow.  When returned it no longer functioned and I replaced it.  Prior to loaning it to this “former friend” it functioned very well. This happened about three years ago and just recently it occurred to me that a document that I have been searching for is probably one that I composed and saved on this laptop. Stupidly I never performed a backup. 

When I turn the laptop on I get an alarm, and then it displays “A disk read  error occurred”  with instructions to Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.

During my repair attempts I came upon the Phoenix Bios Setup Utility where under tools I conducted a “Hard Drive Self Test”.  Before long I get the message #2-07 Fail.  I also tried inserting the “Operating System CD” when I turned the laptop on and it appeared to be hard at work for quite awhile. Bottom line was no change.  Any help will be much appreciated

– Jim R.
Valparaiso, Florida

A: It sounds to me like you already have your answer, Jim, but I’ll break it down for you (pun intended).  A) You have “an ancient laptop” which you B) “let someone borrow” without knowing what happened while it was out of your sight.  C) It came back to you with a problem, and you let it sit for three years. D) Never having made a backup, you now want to attempt to retrieve a document that you’re not even sure is on it.  That’s quite a tall order.

First of all, your anger toward FF (“former friend”) may be misplaced.   It sounds like you loaned him a lemon, and it’s very possible that it was on the verge of dying, and just happened to expire while in FF’s possession through no fault of FF’s.  Then again, FF might have dropped it, or static-zapped it or something – you just never know.

The error code the BIOS is displaying is very telling.  It’s saying the hard drive is either failing, or has failed.  That being the case, attempting to use the original CD to repair the operating system is not likely to work.

Just because the drive is failing doesn’t mean it is completely hopeless.  It’s possible that it will work in fits and starts, giving you a chance to locate and grab a copy of your file.  Your best bet is to try and do that by connecting the drive as a second drive in a reliable, working machine, or an external drive housing.  You’ll probably need to adapt the drive’s interface to whatever you try to connect it to, which will require a bit of research on your part.  Make sure the file is worth it to you before you start.