Problems with Gateway t-1616

I have a Gateway t-1616, I got it as a birthday gift in November 2007 and since the day I opened it I've had problems with it getting too hot and turning off randomly. It's gotten a lot worse over time. The memory card slot works randomly and the CD/DVD drive is totally useless, as it doesn't read or write CD's anymore.

My problem today started off with me getting a blue screen out of nowhere and at the top it said SESSION3_INITIALIZATION_FAILED. So i turned it off manually. Now when i try to turn it back on, it brings me to a black screen with a white underscore blinking at the top. I press the space bar and it goes to the gateway logo page. Then this cycle repeats until I just shut it off. What exactly is wrong with my computer? They said at gateway to to a Factory Reset but then all of my files will get deleted. How can I get the files off of my computer first?

 

It sounds like your system overheated and cooked.

An easy way to get your files off your system is to buy an external hard drive enclosure (2.5in variety) and then you can plug your hard drive into it and get all the info off of the drive.
Also as a side note always remember to keep good back ups just in case something bad happens, data loss can sometimes suck horribally.

As to your machine... when was the last time you cleaned it out? You more than likely have dust built up in your system and its causing it to cook. It might be too late to help, but try to blow out your system with compressed air. Open up the panels at the bottom to really get a good cleaning.

 

Go into BIOS and check the boot order (Boot priority), check to make sure the hard drive is recognized in the BIOS and that it is the first boot device.

 

Honestly I've never cleaned it, but at this point I'm not interested in fixing it just getting my stuff off of it since I'm getting a new laptop soon. It's also making this noise, like a fast weird noise inside the computer. I got another blue screen too.

 

OK then just pop out the hard drive, put it into an external enclosure, and then you can pull all of your data off with your new system via USB/eSATA/etc

 

I've already done that but it still does the same thing.

Also this black screen comes up saying:

For Realtek RTL8100E/8101E Fast Ethernet Network Adapter
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M8F: Exiting PXE ROM.

 

I think the system is not able to boot from the drive and is attempting to boot from the network. If so you may have cooked the drive and lost all data. To test this pull the drive from the system and see if you can get to bios easily without issue. Keep the HDD and remove all other boot devices and orders and you should get then "no bootable device found" error.

Now the drive could still be good but just the controler that cooked or you just lost/corrupted the MBR etc. Your biggest issue is once you have cooked something it usually is gone and unrecoverable. The drive is always the last thing you want to cook but Murphy's law is what it is............

 

I'm waiting for my father to buy the external enclosure for my computer but he's not doing anything about it. Is that the only way to transport the stuff from my laptop to another computer?

 

if you have another laptop that would accept the drive as a second drive you may try that, warning if there is a problem with the drive it could take the other system with it!. Most likely that wouldn't happen but it COULD..........

 

OK so we bought a Rocketfish 2.5 hard drive enclosure and when we put it in and plug it into the computer, it just makes a noise and isn't coming up in My Computer. We tried the whole freezer trick too. Is it just safe to assume it's officially over?