(soz bout the caps but its urgant)

My Friend has 2 laptops with all his work ect on them and they have both broke in the same way,

the problem is as follows:

"i switch it on and the screen goes blak and if u wait 5 min 1 laptop says i have error code 18 and the other 1 says i have error code 8"

also on one of the laptops before it broke it said to switch the loptop off due to hardware faliure.

They took it to the shops and PC world said it was the hard disk and that to recover the files it will cost 700£!!!!!!!!

He uses msn messenger mainly on both, he only downloads files on 1 of the 2 laptops.

Could it be a virus?

if anybody can help i would be very ghratefull

thank you


Wat could be the problem

Yes it might be a virus - in which case your friend could be very unlucky.

Can you boot the Windows (I assume) disk and reinstall?

Try booting a Linux live CD/DVD disk and see what is on the hard drive.

There are adaptors available that allow a laptop hard-drive to be connected to a PC, you could then examine the hard drive through the PC BUT since there is a strong possibility of a bad virus be very careful or it may kill the PC too.

If you make or acquire an Anti Virus program that will run from CD then I would scan laptop drive that way before booting into Windows.

Good Luck

TurkzZ,

I would look into makeing a bootable cd with BARTPE if you can. I have made several and have saved alot of computers and data with this handy disc. With the right plugins you should be able to check for viruses for free with mcafee command line and also fix corrupted file systems and or move files to a different location accross the network.

thanks you lots loadz

... or if you want a convenient way get a CD called AVAST! Bart CD it's already built compilations of different plug-ins unlike Bart PE you need to compile those plug-ins & burn them to a CD and it's a little drastic it takes lots of time.