Hi
My laptop is 3 yrs old. workig  fine till last week and it just went blank.
I do not have backup of the disk ( That is big concern since i have
lot of photos etc on the machine which i need to recover)
Every time i reboot the machine I get a blank screen or rarely machine
starts but it goes blank. I do not see the  disk light not flickering.
So please avise how can i get a back up of m disk i bought a 250 Gig
external disk to copy stuff. but since my machine is not even coming
up is there any way i can get my stuff from the laptop

Hello sidameya,

Thank you for your question.

The first thing you need to do is get a second machine. A friend's or
even just purchase one (it doesn't matter how good it is, provided it
has IDE connections).

Now, remove the hard drive that has failed and connect it to a
connection that looks like this

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=28724&doy=search

This will connect your laptop hard drive to an IDE connection. It
should now be detected and mounted as a hard drive. If this does not
happen, it is safe to say your hard drive has failed and you need to
send it to a hard drive recovery specialist.

An example of who to speak to would be a team such as this:

ADR Data Recovery
http://www.adrdatarecovery.com/

Speak to them and see what they say if the drive is not detected on
the PC. If the drive is detected as a drive on the PC, then copy the
data from the laptop drive to your required destination. Using one of
these methods should ensure your data recovery.

If you have any questions, leave a comment and I'll be glad to assist you further.

--keystroke-ga

If you look on the back or the side of your laptop you should have a
blue vga plug that you could hook an external monitor up to. Once the
external monitor is plugged in power up the laptop and see if the
screen displays then you can go about copying your data over.

Its very possible the LCD has just malfunctioned on the laptop and
using this method you should be able to get access to the pc.

If this method does still not work there is an alternative of pulling
the hard drive out of the laptop and placing it into an external usb
drive carrier and accessing the files from another computer.