Counsel needed for possile HD fix
Hi. First Post. I have a prolem with my laptop and was wondering if people here can counsel or point to help. My laptop sometimes refuses to boot my windows OS (Windows 7). I first thought it might be the OS itself but when I put the disk in and attempted to repair the OS it says no Hard Drive is found. So I look for the hard drive info in the ios setting and it isn't there.
When it eventually booted I used a friend's HDD repair program but the scan function read the HD is running perfectly.
My question is:
What could cause the HD to not fire up and read as if it isn't there only to read as running fine when it eventually does boot?
and
How can I fix this problem? Is there a program I can use or a relatively cheap option to bringing it in and losing all the new data since my last backup?
Thanx in advance for any help you can give.