Boot Problem on HP ze2000 Laptop

[DanMattia]

One of my friends has an HP ze2000 laptop that hasn't booted successfully for a few weeks now. Her warranty's expired, so I'm going to take a look at it.

The problem occurs once the HP logo loads at the beginning of the boot-up sequence, after the BIOS-key is shown, etc. The error that pops up is:

Media Test Failure Check Cable
Exiting PXE ROM

I've never encountered a problem like this, so I wanted to check here before I tried anything more than I've done already.

To ensure the laptop was working, I loaded a few live Linux CDs, which worked (for the most part) in text-only mode. I couldn't get Ubuntu Live to open the graphical mode, but I'm not sure if that was a laptop problem or just Linux.

The hard drive MUST be saved from this laptop, if that's all I can do. She has many important documents and pictures on it that she considers extremely valuable, so keep this in mind. I also don't want her to go to Best Buy to spend $250 for them to look at it, so I want to keep this as cost-effective as possible, if we're able to do that.

I don't have system specs, unfortunately, and it'll be rather hard to obtain them right now. That said, the laptop does not have a floppy drive, only a CD/DVD-ROM, though I believe all components are working fine.

I do remember seeing or diagnosing that it was the wireless that was causing the problem, though I'm not sure of how to disable that to see.

Thank you in advance for any advice/help you can give me

 

[Codegen]

That specific error is because it's trying to boot from the network via PXE because it can't find anywhere else to boot from.

If it just stopped all of a sudden:

Best case scenario: Windows is borked. Use Windows recovery console and type in 'fixmbr' and see if that works. If not, use Linux LiveCD to copy needed files to network
Worst case scenario: Hard drive is fucked, and so are you.

 

[DanMattia]

Hmm, well, I changed the boot order and it does detect the hard drive, and the hard drive is second to boot after CD-ROM, and network is nowhere in the boot order list.

If, after I've said that, it still is determined to be the hard drive, could I take the hard drive out and install it in my desktop to get the files off?

 

[DanMattia]

Sorry for the necropost:

If the hard drive is indeed dead, the information can still be pulled off of it, correct? I understand there'll be some loss, but the information is crucial (yet, unfortunately, not backed up) to the client. I do understand the information can be pulled off, though how would this be done (and what's the estimated cost, roughly)?

Thank you very much.