While working on my HP Pavillion 734n last night, my screen suddenly went blank, and the PC appeared to lose all power.

I unplugged the unit and tried to restart it.
However, when I pushed the button to restart it, the yellow light on the front of the unit stays on for approx 10 seconds, then goes off. The fan appears to be running, but the hard drive doesn't seem to be kicking in!

Could the hard drive have 'crashed' while I was in the middle of working in it?
The computer is about 3 years old and hasnt been moved or exposed to any change in conditions.

Any advice on what I can do to try and re-boot it or save the hard drive ?

Stupid me has all of the kids summer photos on the hard drive that hadn't bene backed up yet !!!

Thanks in advance !

Hi. Have you made any changes to the system recently? What were you doing when the system shut off? If the hard drive crashed, don't worry. With today's technology, you usually don't lose many files.

What was I doing when the system shut off?
Nothing really, apart from just sorting through some of the 'afore mentioned' photos !
No recent system chages either ... in fact, the PC has been sitting idle for the last two weeks.

Thanks for giving me a little bit of hope that all is not lost !

while it could be that your hard drive died i would put my money on the power supply going out. If you have a second computer you could try putting your hard drive in and see if it is recognized though be aware if it is a large drive ( above 80 ) and the second computer is old it may not recognize it anyway....

as far as power supply I've seen a lot of those go out... Then can get pretty stressed depending on your system and where you are.... power company fluctuations are particularly rough on them....

I don't know if I'm supposed to post in other ppl's topics (if I'm not then I'm sry for breaking the rules) but I have an HP too and my power supply was faulty when I bought it (i've since had it fixed) but the only thing the Power supply effected was if I had the Computer Unplugged for more then a few hours it would turn on for about 6 hours(like it was charging the power supply)....
Then again I only had a faulty Power supply, not completely dead....

As for my HP dying I did have it die on me about 6 months ago and it was on but it didn't black out like that (persay)...I came back and took it out of sleep mode and it said something Like Windows XP not responding,and upon restarting it, it said Operating System error....Had to get brand new hard drive (under warranty thank God)

Many thanks to everybody for all of the replies !

After shard92 mentioned that the power supply could be faulty, I tried what was suggested and took the hard drive out of the HP and installed it as a slave drive on my daughters Dell.

Well, lo and behold, the HP drive now appears on the Dell, complete with all of the data (that my wife was convinced I had lost).

Needless to say, all important stuff has now been burnt and saved !!

Now, all I have to do is get the power supply fixed ...........

Thanks guys again !

Ah! The Importance of backing up your data.

If your not In that big of a hurry Powersupplies are relatively inexpensive online. Most HPs use a micro ATX so be carefull what you order. I look at Pricewatch.com first when I need parts.