My 1.5 year old, emachines t455(?) won't start up anymore. All I get is a blank, black screen about 30 seconds into the boot up process, and at the top of the screen it says "disk read error, press ctrl/alt/del to restart".
When I press ctrl/alt/del to restart, it restarts and ends up at the same identical black screen with the same error message at the top.
Believe it or not, this all happened after I installed a newly purchased copy of norton antivirus from best buy - the irony kills me!
Even stranger: my son was messing with the dvd and cd drives while I was trying to get it to start up, and he left the drive bay open, and it started, but was very slow. I thought this would be my window of opportunity to save all of the important pics and videos of my son, but then it failed on me again, and now that trick with the drives doesn't work anymore.
What I really need is the pics, and I don't want to use the restore cds for the machine because I will lose everything.
Any suggestions for how to get it to boot up, and then save my pics and vids, and then I will do a restore?
Thank you so much for your time
