black screen

[tbuskirk]

i have a hp laptop windows 7 and when i turn it on thats all i get is a black screen and it says hard disk does not exist. can anyone help me?

 

[Pauly]

Hello tbuskirk, welcome to SF

Can you give us the exact error message you are seeing
Did you do anything preceding this fault or anything else you think is relevant

First step would be to enter bios when powering on machine to see if the HDD is showing or not, if bios recognises then you could try running a HDD diagnostic program to examine the disk for you to check for errors
Have a look at this Hard Drive Diagnostic Procedure to use something like this SeaTools | Seagate
or windows has a more basic one built in have a look at option 2 here http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/433-disk-check.html which will require you to get to a http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/682-command-prompt-startup.html

 

[bobafetthotmail]

hard disk is the laptop's main memory device, the place where everything is stored into. Even files needed to run Windows 7 at all.

When you turn on you should see some white text, and among that there should be a line telling what button to press to get into BIOS settings, it is usually F2 or F12 or Del, be very quick and press it multiple times just after you turn it on.

Once you are in the BIOS settings screen navigate around it with arrows and enter button, find the page that talks about hard drives and see if it lists a hard drive in there (the name should look like a bunch of letters and numbers and maybe some hint at capacity and manufacturer, like this: HTS727550A9E364)

Then do what Pauly says.