Boot it up in safe mode is a good place to start

tried safe mode not much happened

i have the recovery CD but i was relucant to format it  as i havnt bcked up the business documents for a couple of weeks! silly git

its having a diagnosis done on it now to determine the problem only costing £25, didnt think that was too terrible.  Hope its nothing serious, although the technician did say that my model of laptop has a big problem with over heating when used on your LAP!!!!!!

and if that does not work then you could try this with it...
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=YocnQ0NMTUA&feature=related

Had the same problem with mine. (Yours wasn't a Toshiba was it?)

You got off lightly. Would have cost £150 for my local computer shop to try a replacement hard drive and there was no guarantee that would have worked - and that was just the cost of the hard drive - because if the hard drive won't boot the OS can't work on anything you put in to diagnose the problem(s). Catch 22.

I have total faith in my shop, they're sound people, they didn't charge me for the hour or so they'd tried recovering things.

Upshot? As I could buy a second hand refurbished laptop for £157 with six months warranty, preloaded with XP Professional, from Steve's place, I left my machine with them to do with as they liked and sell on and bought myself an Asus Eee PC notebook from Staples for £147 new, which allows me to take it with me EVERYWHERE (it fits into my work jacket pocket or the glove compartment of the Transit). I save everything of note onto a 2 gig memory stick, including downloaded pdf files off my local authority planning web site (full docs of planning apps) which enables me to discuss jobs with the customer anywhere. Fate, such as it is, actually did me a favour this time.

Memory sticks can fail, especially cheap ones.  They also get lost.  I hope you keep a compy of the data on the memory stick an your PC at home too.

I would be more inclined to correctly network and setup shared files between your PC and your laptop, and then you could transfer files directly from your PC to your laptop.  You could even look at synconisation software which ensures that your "My Documents" folder (and other folders you wish) remain the same when you return your laptop "to base".

to answer your question yes it is a toshiba satellite, strangely enough

i thought toshiba was meant to be a hardy laptop

mine did seem to go out of date very quickly, although i feel this is always true

to be fair this is the second time mine has had to be formatted and the first time was completely my fault and its approaching three years old i think, ive spoken to other people whos laptop has gone up the creek after a year and a half and PC world wouldnt touch it even with their service contract thing

it did survive a fall that was bad enough to smash out the clip that keeps the hard drive in place, and dislodge the hard drive.

so that said i cant moan too much about it i just wish it wudnt happen at a time when cash flow is so crap because of customers not paying and im trying to save to go on holiday!

Lec, I have the Hp Pavilion as well and lost the screen, anyway to cut a long story short, I got a Dell 21" monitor from Pcworld plug it in and away we go  

Also years ago I got an Integral (brand name) external hard drive case, and stuck a 500G hard drive innit, took everything off the computer on to the remote, so all that's left is the operating system, the speed increased at least double.

What I do now is open the program in the remote and work from that.

Another trick which seems to works well is I laid 12" floor tiles on the desk and it acts as a heat sink, it runs much cooler now.