Be careful in there. Look at the harddrive and see if it is a Western Digital. (I know it sounds a bit off but it's true that it is possible)

The reason for that is that some WD drives do all the sudden start asking for a password. It happened to me. All I did was enter setup one rime to see if I could disable the webcam (I thought it might be the source of another problem). At this point if all it says is enter password, it might be a HD password. You have no way of knowing unless you have seen that password box on that unit before. If you want some info on it just google for "WD1600BEVT password". Those drives were used in Toshiba laptops as well as my Gateways.

There is a procedure you can do on a Toshiba that fixes it but it won't work on a Gateway (lucky me), however it invloves copying and pasting some code from a website and then making a bootable CD or thumbdrive and all this crap.

I found this is a common problem with the 160GB models but nothing indicates that it is exculsive to them. There's no reason it should be.

At any rate, if you can get the thing to boot, get a bunch of thumbdrives and get every picture and everything backed up ASAP. I mean do that first. If it boots, leave it running and turn off the power saving so it doesn't shut itself down. After you have the backup, see if it does have that type of drive and let me know, I'll see if I can find the code and the instructions again.

However beware, I do not know if recovering the drive with that method saves or destroys the data.

J