HP Laptop won't boot.

So a friend of mine has this HP laptop that she bought not that while ago.

It was working great so far until this morning.

When she tries to turn it on, a DOS message appears saying 'no boot system disk' (or something to that effect).

So, I was wondering, is there a bootable software that I don't know about that's able to recover some of the files currently on the HDD? (she really needs some of them).

Thanks in advanced.

EDIT: I don't know the exact model of the laptop though. Sorry =(

Lemur said:

One possibility is the hard drive has gone bad.
Another is disk corruption.
Check the bios to see if it recognized the disk, and is set to boot on it.
Find out what model notebook your friend has, see if they have a hard drive diagnostic, and run it.

Thanks for the quick reply mate.

Do you know of any bootable file recovery softwares?

She really needs some of the files on the HDD.

Is that one of those removable harddrives?
check if it's locked in correctly or if it came lose somehow.
HP doesn't give you Disks...you have to create them from the rescue partition (D:\)

You could try this one tho

System Repair Disc - Create

Good luck
-DG