Last week was pretty dire, with my computer, the boiler, my parents' bikes, my bike lock key (and therefore lock) and my brother's access to the door all being mercilessly taken away from us
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Physically unplug and re-plug the graphics card. Also see if it is one of those with a power connector and check that. Other than that, whip the hard-drive out and connect it to one of your spare PCs :).
The monitor socket: is it on the computer's mainboard, or on a separate video card? If the latter, you should be able to remove and re-seat it by undoing one screw and wiggling carefully.
If it's part of the mainboard, that's quite another matter.
If you have a video card, but also a monitor socket on the mainboard, try plugging the monitor into the other socket. If you have video on the wrong one the BIOS may have got misconfigured.
What makes you say that the computer is otherwise working fine?
If it genuinely is just a video issue: if you've already reseated the cable as part of trying another monitor then reseating the video card would be a reasonable next thing to try (while the computer is disconnected from the power!), as would swapping the video card for another one.
On the other hand if the computer is bust in some other way then it may nonetheless be possible to get data of the hard disk by plugging it into another computer. If it's a SATA disk then 'another computer' will need to be something vaguely recent, if it's an IDE disk then an older machine will do.
If it's the hard disk itself that's failed then your choices are pretty much spending several thousand pounds on a data recovery service, or kicking yourself for not taking any backups.
Yes, if the problem is only with the hard drive, then it's likely you'd see the BIOS messages. But it's not impossible for more than one component to fail at once.
If you need your coursework imminently lest disastrous events should follow, you could bring your hard drive over here and I could print it off for you.
That is, unless your data is horrendously corrupted and all hope is gone forever.
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If it's part of the mainboard, that's quite another matter.
If you have a video card, but also a monitor socket on the mainboard, try plugging the monitor into the other socket. If you have video on the wrong one the BIOS may have got misconfigured.
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What makes you say that the computer is otherwise working fine?
If it genuinely is just a video issue: if you've already reseated the cable as part of trying another monitor then reseating the video card would be a reasonable next thing to try (while the computer is disconnected from the power!), as would swapping the video card for another one.
On the other hand if the computer is bust in some other way then it may nonetheless be possible to get data of the hard disk by plugging it into another computer. If it's a SATA disk then 'another computer' will need to be something vaguely recent, if it's an IDE disk then an older machine will do.
If it's the hard disk itself that's failed then your choices are pretty much spending several thousand pounds on a data recovery service, or kicking yourself for not taking any backups.
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That is, unless your data is horrendously corrupted and all hope is gone forever.
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