Laptop computer / Geek HELP HELP HELP HELP ASAP

wife's gateway laptop won't boot up the am giving an error that the cpu fan is dead. Is there anyway to bypass this to grab a couple files off of it and shut down? She could get tossed out of medical school if we can't get to some of her files today.....

 

Need to pull the hard drive, and slave boot it on either another laptop or on a tower.

I sadly don't have a ton of exp with this.

Call your local computer shop, and ask them what they charge for HDD recovery...then have her backup all her files next time to an external HDD.

 

The error is likely generated by heat and not fan failure but it is possible. The fan is probably coated in dust, this retains major amounts of heat. If you can get it blown out, it'll likely solve the problem.

Found this gateway support suggestion :

Otherwise, yes pulling the drive, put it in a 2.5 caddy (computer stores have these) and just get the files off via USB. But like I said, it's likely not a totally dead box.

 

wow, dodged a bullet on this one, pulled a dog sized dust bunny out of the fan that was stopping it from turning, booted up ok now.... scary stuff

 

+1 for thermometers!

(or thermistors...probably a thermistor)

 

Now go to your neighborhood electronics store and get an external USB drive to back up all of her data ASAP.

 

Get a USB Key or even a small inexpensive drive with an enclosure. You can then hook the drive up via the USB to do backups, or if you're in a real dire situation you can yank the drive from the laptop and slap it in the enclosure and see if it is readable by another machine. I do that with dead laptops fairly frequently.

 

^^ What Jed said.