System Disk Unavailable?

First let me say that I am new to the Forum thing so please bear with me. With that being said, I have a question and I have tried searching the web for an answer but have not had any luck. I am actually trying to help a friend out so I don't have a whole lot of specifics. Anyways, she has a laptop (has had it for awhile) and recently she started getting a 'System Disk Unavailable' or something along those lines. Somebody told her to take the hard drive out and when she did, she got 'Optical Drive Not Found'. Any ideas on what might cause this? I would appreciate any feedback I can get. Thanks in advance!

 

This is one of the most common problems with a laptop, failure to find the hard drive.
Why? Because they get moved around, and often the hard drive is also located directly below the keyboard .

There are actually two major causes of this. One is that the battery was allowed to go totally dead, and therefore the BIOS settings (what hard drive and how to find it among other things) were retained only by a couple of tiny watch batteries (Not the big one used on a PC) . Normally , laptop designers assume you will use it and keep the battery charged and either keep it plugged in or keep the battery in . So these are very hard to replace. Often the way to identify this as the cause is that if when you first turn it on you see something like press del to enter setup , and you do and you choose load optimal defaults, save settings and exit , or if when you get that error you just restart a couple times and all is well ; then this is probably the cause.

The other major cause is that the connector cable from the motherboard to the hard drive looks like a peice of 35MM camera film under the keyboard. These have a habit of coming loose in the connector since they are just slid into a slot and a couple of locking ears pressed down but not locked. Often if you just release the keyboard and rotate it towards you , you will see the drive below you and the cable. Release (raise) the ears, lift out the cable, reseat it to bottom of slot and press down on the ears.
Reseat keyboard and all is fixed.

The final probable cause is that the drive is failing.

 

I appreciate your help and will check these things out. However, if that is not the case and it is the drive failing, how possible would it be to recover what is on the drive? She has all her financial data on there and has not been consistent with backups. Although, I'm sure that will not be a problem after this.

And this really is for a friend and not for myself...

 

If the drive has not failed, you can buy an adapter so you can install it in a PC, then buy a new drive, likewise with an adapter and use standard new drive configuration software to clone the old drive to the new one.

If you have a network, you could use ghost or similar to save a drive image to another computer, then when you have replaced the drive, just restore from the image.

The drive manufacturer should have available for download and burn to cdr as a bootable cd, a test software suite to diagnose the drive.

 

Great! Thanks so much for your help.