Not sure of which part of the forum this belongs to, so I hope this is correct.  I've already searched the forums and can't seem to find my answer.

I own a Compaq (at least I think it's Compaq!) laptop, that is about 4-5 years old.  I'm AFRAID I can't say anymore than that except that a sticker on the bottom of the laptop says Model: 6120 and that I have a serial NUMBER.  The old owner took off all the labels.

It had a hard time SHUTTING down last night, and when I woke up in the morning, it was still in the same mode, "shutting down" WinXP, showing my background without anything else running.  I force shutdown it, by holding the POWER button.

But when I tried to turn it on, the computer wouldn't boot for some odd reason, and when I went into BIOS, I found the primary drive disabled.  I remember that on my desktop, I could enable the hard drive through BIOS, but for some odd reason this one didn't have that capability.

Because of this issue, I couldn't even reformat the drive, because it would tell me that I don't have ACCESS to the voume, or that it's non-existant.  I couldn't even reinstall the OS.  It still complained that it was unaccessible.

Is there anything I can do to re-enable this drive?  I would really appreciate the help!Do you have any system recovery disks? If you have a Win XP cd, you could also try the recovery console and run chkdsk once your logged into the admin account...

[glb]Gizmo73[/glb]go back in the bios setup and chose setup defaults save and exit it.....if not it maybe thehard drive is sticking.......///or a corupted /damaged driver...what happens if you hold the f8 and chose the last good config....There's only one partition, and that's the inaccessible one.

Recovery console can't do anything since it can't access the disabled drive; chkdisk also couldn't find the disabled drive.

Went into BIOS before I posted the earlier entry and tried to revert to default settings, but still says disabled drive.

Last good configuration didn't work either...

The computer was working fine, and since it's a laptop, I haven't opened it to look at the inside or anything, so I doubt it was some wiring problem.  Is there any other way to re-enable the drive?

Thanks for helping, guys.you could try this......tap the underneath of the laptop. near the hard drive bay..just when it booting.......Hmm... that didn't seem to work either...

Does it look doomed?what is the make of the hard drive......bad ones are ibm travelstar.....or fugitsu........take the drive out.....and shove it back in sometimes that works.......