My Compaq laptop has a hard drive problem. When starting up it sticks on the HP logo for a while, then puts up the message "1792 Secondary Disk Controller Failure". If you press F10 for ROM based setup you get "Entering setup" for a while before a new screen with a message with a blue background saying "DriveLock Multibay Password (followed by a picture of a key)". Even without pressing F10 you reach this final screen, and the last time I tried starting up the laptop it skipped the "1792..." message screen and went straight to the final "DriveLock..." screen. This looks pretty serious to me and I'd be v grateful for advice on i) rescuing hard drive data, and ii) if possible getting the laptop/hard drive working again. But the data is more important (lazily only backed up 3 weeks ago so am missing stuff). I've talked to a couple of 'experts', one of which told me that it is a Compaq issue and that I've either entered a password to lock it (which I haven't) or it's a virus (my scanner was up to date). They didn't have any constructive suggestions. The other expert asked me if the hard drive had been 'clicking' much recently, which it has, and told me that the hard drive was just getting old / needing servicing, before asking me to remove the hard drive. Before I start doing something which might damage the laptop even more I wanted to check if anyone really knows what has happened.... Many thanks, Alex (London)
