laptop crashed?

IBM thinkpad. Was online the other night, set the computer down for a few minutes and when I came back it was rebooting. Now all it will do is shut down and reboot, get to a blue screen that says something about a problem with software/hardware/bios issues (only up for a few seconds) then reboots again. Continuously. I was able to get into safe mode and pull all my pics etc off onto an external drive, but no clue on the issue. Suggestions?


On that note, I am looking to replace it and repair it for a backup. Anything available refurbed etc? Need decent memory and speed and wireless.

Baseball Bat !

Probably a bad sector on the hard drive, or the hard drive is failing. Some Thinkpads have a utility partition which can be accessed by hitting the blue think vantage button during startup. There may be a diagnostic program for the hard drive through that. If not, Visit http://www.hitachigst.com/support/downloads/ and create a DVD with drive fitness test and boot with it. Alternatively if you can get your laptop to me I can do diagnostics for you. Best case windows got screwed up and will need to be reloaded. Worst case the hard drive is going bad and needs to be replaced. I doubt it's anything more serious than that. The other possibility is bad memory... But that's rare.

pretty sure its the drive, now it wont do anything. gonna try to get a part number off it, are they fairly easy to get something new?

Ill tear into jeans toshiba later and get you the numbers off the HHD Maybe it will work for you.

alright, got the fitness test to run and if I'm running it right, it comes back saying no errors? Does that tell me the hd is ok?

if you ran the full test, yes, the drive should be fine in which case it's probably just a damaged windows file causing it to boot-loop. Reloading windows should take care of it. You should either have restore discs or a recovery partition and can reload windows via either.

no windows on recovery...and cannot find windows/partition on ibm setup. Whats your turnaround time right now?

I should know within 24 hours how long it will take.

Ok...how do I get it to you?