M17X R1 Boot issues

My laptop was working fine until last night. Today morning, after the BIOS, instead of seeing the windows loading screen, all I see is a blinking _(underscore).
I can't go to safe mode or anything. It just keeps blinking. I took out the hard drive and used an external enclosure but it says that it needs to be formatted before using it. I tried to reinstall windows, but it sees the hard drive as unpartitioned drive.
So, anyway to boot or recover my data? Thanks a lot!

 

Any RAID-ing?
If not, maybe corrupted bootloader/bad sector.

Try to use the info here (second or third post) to repair the bootloader: Windows 7 does not boot - blinking cursor - Microsoft Community
I'll assume you're using Windows 7.

 

No, I don't have raid. Its a single hdd with Windows 7. Let me check the link you posted.
Thanks +rep

 

I hope it's as easy as a broken bootloader. This can sometimes occur from a bad shutdown, a system crash, a bad sector, or a virus.
I'm assuming this is the case since otherwise you would probably have gotten a NO BOOT DEVICE DETECTED or similar error.
Make sure you don't have a SD card or USB stick plugged in (it shouldn't actually matter, but you never know).

 

Ok, after I followed the steps and fixed mbr and boot. It shows a new error now. I googled for that error but there is not a fix that sounds good and recover my data.
I can't use it as a external because it asks to format the hdd and use it. When I tried to reinstal the windows, the hdd needed formatting and partition.

 

Ooh, That's no bueno. That points towards either the hard drive controller going bad or the whole drive being corrupted. You said you've tried using it as an external. Does that mean you tried plugging it into another system that's working and seeing if Windows explorer boots is up?

 

Yes I used an external enclosure. It detects the hard drive but I need to format it before using it. I don't care about the hard drive but wanted to restore my data. If only I could boot and get my data, I could throw away the hdd.

 

Have you tried hooking the hard drive directly to a working system via SATA? If that doesn't work, there is a long shot. it involves swapping out the hard drive controller on the bottom of the drive with one from another working drive. It's a very long shot as two different brand hard drive controllers may not match up to the bottom connectors of the drive...but I've had it work for me before.

 

I agree with radji, if you really need the info in the drive you can try swapping the controllers but it may not work. If not, there are some companies very good at recovering information from damaged HDDs, maybe they can do it for you.