X40 with "Error loading operating system"

[bonez318ti]

I have an x40 with windows XP SP2 (ithink) that has never given me any real stability issues. At some point in ownership of the laptop, I had dropped the computer which corrupted my hard drive.. so I reinstalled a new one and loaded XP with a [censored] version of the thinkpad utilities on it (I don't even remember what I did and didn't load).

Today, I hooked my laptop up to my plasma to watch some videos(which I have done in the past), except this time, i got the bright idea of changing the resolution so that I wouldn't get the black bands on the top and bottom of the screen.

After I watched the movie, I flipped back to the laptop LCD (Fn-F7).. and it hung for several minutes. I guess i got impatient and without even thinking about it, I turned it off.

When I turned it on again, I get the initial bios screen and then where it normally proceeds to load XP, I get Error Loading Operating System. At this point, the only think I can do is to turn it off where it gives a loud beep and turns off. (after i turned it off, I realized I never reset the resolution and maybe thats why it hung?)

I don't have immediate access to my dock nor my XP discs. I was wondering if there is anything i can do to save it? I'll be able to get my dock and xp disks this weekend.. but its HIGHLY inconvenient not to be able to access my computer for the next two days.

so my questions:

1) how to proceed?
2) could my impetuance in restarting my computer have corrupted my hard drive, or might it be hard ware related?

Thanks for any insights.

[Harryc]

There is no simple answer...it could be hardware or XP, but you will need your dock in order to run PC-Doctor, and you'll need another machine to burn the CD to do that.

[bonez318ti]

Assuming I don't have PC Doctor anymore, are there any options I should pursue?

Right now, I'm only thinking of using the recovery console on the Win XP discs.

Do you think is necessary for me to try to recover data from the hd before i start messing around with it? I have two partitions on it, one for personal data and one for apps (which still had some data on it like from my outlook). I probably haven't backed anything up in a year or two. (yea, my bad).

Any plan on how to proceed once I get home would be helpful. There is a chance that I may not have access to the internet once i get home, so I'm trying to figure out a plan of attack and to try to get as much software/utilities as I can downloaded/ripped and create any necessary boot discs first.

if it matters, currently I have my brother's T41, a CD burner and a 512 USB drive. Is there any type of diagnostics I can load onto and boot from the USB drive?

I've found some tools (ie: ultimate boot CD) out there seemed helpful, but they require a CD (I havent been successful in being able to load that .iso into a bootable format from the USB).

[Harryc]

Don't have Pc-Doctor?

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... 56222.html

You don't need to back up any data prior to running the diagnostics.