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Hi Aaron, I've had a couple of PCSpecialist laptops in the past few years, their repair centre is competent but you're quite right about not getting a backup. They're a useful supplier though. I've yet to find any local laptop specialists that will do anything to a laptop for less that £100. Cheapest - If you have access to another laptop, you could temporarily put your SSD into it and see if it will boot from there. This probably involves tinkering with the BIOS in the other laptop, you might prefer not to do that. Next cheapest - If you have no interest in any data on the disk then you can replace it, eBuyer sell 480GB SSDs for under £50 delivered. If that doesn't clear your problem then you might end up with two working disks and your data still usable on the original, and a laptop you can send to the supplier for mending. You'll definitely know at that point whether the problem is your drive or not. If your data is worth more than £100 to you, that's what a specialist data recovery firm will charge to retrieve it for you from a damaged SSD. You send it with maybe £50 and they'll tell you whether they can help and they'll give you a firm quote. No local laptop specialist can be trusted with a job like that, they're shopkeepers. I recover data for neighbours but I'd not trust me to do it. What a data recovery firm will do for £100 is try the drive and maybe it's okay anyway; then they'll replace the interface board with a working one and see if that gets it going; then they'll take the cover off and re-seat the heads back into the parking bay, reseal the drive and try one last time. Anything beyond that they'd charge a fortune. On Mon, 8 Feb 2021 at 16:03, maceion@xxxxxxxxx <maceion@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On 08/02/2021 15:42, Sebastian wrote: > > Dear Aaron, > > > >> I have had a pc specialist laptop for about 2 years, only got a 1 year > >> full warranty, and don't fancy trying to package and send and argue > >> with them to get it sorted, especially as they will format the drive > >> without backing it up. > >> > >> Anyway the laptop no longer boots from the ssd and the bios doesn't > >> even see a drive. > > > > Before you send the laptop off for repair, you may want to check that > > the problem really is the drive and not something else. I would try > > booting with a live OS image and seeing if a utility like lsblk, GNU > > parted, or GNOME Disks sees the drive. > > > > If it does detect the SSD and it looks right (is of the right capacity, > > has the right partitions etc.), you could try mounting it (you can do > > that from within GNOME Disks) and seeing if your data is there. If you > > are lucky enough to find all your data intact then you can move onto the > > recovery stage! > > > > Unfortunately I don't think that is likely to be the case, but it's > > worth a try, even if just to check that the BIOS detects the live image > > from a USB drive or DVD. > > > > Best wishes (and good luck!), > > > > Sebastian > > > > -- > > - Freenode: 'seabass' > > - Matrix: '@seabass:chat.weho.st' > > > > Question: Does your laptop have both a DVD drive and a USB connection? > If BIOS will detect a Live Distro as DVD or USB. > If so,I recommend as a first try to try to boot from in order: > 1. DVD of Live Knoppix distro > 2. USB of Live Knoppix distro > It has good hardware detection and would enable you to 'lift' data to a > separate USB connected hard disc as a back up. > > IF Live Knoppix starts, then the laptop hardware is OK , except for > hard disc OS. Then if and only if , you have /home on a separate > partition, you could restore by re-installing OS to see if it works. > -- > Regards > Eion MacDonald > > -- > The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG > https://mailman.dcglug.org.uk/listinfo/list > FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dcglug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq