BIOS problem

[DeepThought]

Boot with a live usb. If you manage to get to the live desktop your laptop drive should appear as a removal drive and you should be able to mount it. If you get to this point I would immediately transfer any files/docs etc which are important to you to another external usb drive.

If the laptop drive does not appear try:

Code:

sudo blkid

or

Code:

sudo fdisk -l

either command should list all the drives on the system, check the size to see if your 250Gb drive is there. If not i think it will definitely be a hdd fault.