Hi, there I have been used my laptop compaq Evo N800c for almost 3 yrs. Two weeks ago, I tried to starup my laptop,but it gave me error messages stated that I have disk in my drive,(non-system disk error) and I checked it CD Rom and Floppy drive where nothing were in there, then after while screen was all blacked out. I noticed the my laptop still power on it,but it just had nothing showing or startup in regular way. I put my ear close to laptop and heard something try to start(could be hard drive),and it sounds like lack of power to start. My laptop had full batter power and also plug into wall outlet. So I know that laptop must had some kind hard drive issues or something else,so I left them in my room.Now today, I tried to open my laptop, and hopefully can fix it up, but soon I started it, it just gave me blacked screen for periods of time without showing anything, meanwhile, I heard that little start noise from inside of laptop, it sounds like hard drive noise, but i am not absolutely sure what that was. So Is anyway that I can replace hard drive or parts to get my laptop back to normal again. Thank you for help! John

It sounds like your hard drive died or it may have just had the partition table tweaked. If you have a system disk you can try to fix it. But the drive could be dead. Another thing to ask is, Do you have a USB external drive or memory stick plugged in? It may be set to put from USB. If it is and you do, then it may be trying to boot from the USB that does not have an OS on it. The fact that it tells you there is no bootable disk is a good indication that the laptop still works. If you buy a drive and it doesn't fix it, then just return the drive. But I think that should fix it. You may want to try putting your XP disk or whatever OS you had's disk into the drive and try to repair the install.

Don't be surprised if you put in a new hard drive and things don't improve or get worse. You might have to download a utility from the Compaq site to set up the new hard drive.

The disk issue might just be coincidence, if you can hear the drive starting up then maybe the monitor has the problem, We have a laptop at work where it seems to have started up but nothing on the screen, it turned out to be the little button that turns off the screen when you close the lid was broken. Maybe you should check that. cheers Columbo1977 Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers and nobody thinks of complaining. -Jeff Raskin-