Hihi..... im new here and my notebook has encountered a very serious problem and i need everyone's advice here.... i've searched through the forums and i cant find similar problems....hope u guys can help me out....

this is my notebook's spec:
Twinhead
Pentium 4 Mobile 1.7GHz
192mb DDR Ram
30gb Fujitsu Harddisk

This notebook is around 5 years old, and since last few months, it has been restarting once my notebook gets very hot, so i ll put some solid objects below my notebook to let it cooler and the problem has reduced....

Until yesterday, when i boot my notebook, after the bios screen, the whole screen is black and no windows logo appear, i tried to press f8 and get into safe mode but its stil the same.... and i noticed some how when reading my hard disk time....its very slow....therefore i went to bios, set everything into optimum settings and tried to auto detect my harddisk again...... and yet it doesn't solve the problem.....

Without hope, i let my notebook load up normally and see what happens, and after a few minutes, it says that my hal.dll is missing or corrupted, then i was so excited as i thought that i can solved the problem by just replacing the corrupted hal.dll with a backup one.....but i was wrong....

I tried to use Windows 98 disc to load the dos prompt with cd rom support, and strangely, it load up very slow, and its even slower when i browse into the c:\windows folder, and when i browse into the system32 folder, it says unable to read, gived me options:abort,retry or fail??....sigh.....

I didnt give up, i even down and burnt the Knoppix and Bart's PE disc, and loaded them into my notebook, trying to browse into system32 folder , and the same problem appear, very slow and even hangs.....

I think this is my hard disk problem, therefore i downloaded the "hard disk diagnostic tool" from fujitsu web site, but this time, i cant even load the windows 98 prompt, so the dianostic tool is useless now.....

Can anyone help me here....?? im totaly desperate now....

Your HD probably developed a bad sector in the system area. That is what's slowing down your system and preventing it to read the disk properly. You should run the scandisk with a surface scan.

Thanks Chaky....i've just ran Chkdsk utility by using Bart's PE.... It says contains some Bad Sectors and cannot be correct.....Therefore i restart the notebook.... then on the bios screen.... i got this error code:

Pri Master Hark Disk : S.M.A.R.T Status BAD, Backup and Repair
Press F1 to resume

Sigh....I think my hard disk really spoiled and need to be replaced.... but i got plenty of important files inside it..... so any suggestion on how to copy out the files???

I'm not sure how possible is to install second HD into your notebook, but if it is possible, I suggest that you Install the 2nd HD, configure them so that old one is slave or master on sec. channel (anyway it will be the "D" drive), install the windows on new one and try to salvage any data if the hd is accessible at all. If it's not... sorry, no help. I did hear of some companies that spaecialise in data recovery from dead HDs but I have no idea how much they charge for it.

you will need to get a new hdd for the laptop and re install all the software, windows etc.
to recover the data from the old drive your best option would be to get an adapter (about $2) so you can attach it to the ide cable in a desktop/tower as slave or secondary master and copy the files you need to save to the main drive. Then repeat the process to copy them back to the new drive.
NOTE be carefull when hooking up the adapter it must go pin1 to pin1 or you will literally fry the drive and loose all your data.
you can't do a "ghost" because the bad sectors will corrupt the partition table in the new drive. this way you should get back most if not all of your data.

Another usefull tool for this type of problem if the data is in damaged sectors is HDD Regenerator, this can repair bad sectors on the drive through the data leaving it intact at least long enough to get your data off. though it appears to be only a short term fix as the drive will go bad again fairly quickly.

My suggeation is instead of trying to recover the data Yourself and by so means loosing your complete harddisk that happened to me, what i say instead of that you can try the Disk Recovery labs that provide complete data recovery options and they also have the facilty of no recovery no money back offer. The place from where i got my Disk Recovered after it was crashed is Disk Doctors Labs Inc.
You can also try the Website http://www.diskdoctors.com/ adn they also provide the Shipping facilty.
Check it out yourself and dont forget to tell me what happened later.