When I turn on my laptop I get this message no operating system found. I went into the bios to run a test on the hard drive the result was no ide found so then I swicth the HD to a different bay ran the test again the test passed so I restarted the laptop I still got the same message no operating system found. Is there anything I can do to fix this problem rather than replace the HD? I know this is going to sound stupid but I never back up the system nor did I create the set of recovery disks. Is there anything I can do to at least get my data off the HD?

Did your laptop come with a vista CD? If it did you might be able to repair it using the CD. If not, try plugging into another computer as a slave and see if it comes up in windows so you can save your data.

Or, if the machine's bootable from CD, and you have a CD/DVD burner or USB flash, you may also want to try a live Linux distribution (one with K3B - the CD/DVD burner for Linux) to recover the data. Not knowing your system specs, I'd recommend a low-resource distro such as NimbleX: http://www.livecdlist.com/

Gamer126 No it didn't come with cd's. I will try to another laptop. Thanks! T-R-A I will check nimblex and let you know the outcome. Thanks.