My Aer TravelMate 290 does not boot from hard or CD !

What is your knowledge of computers and laptops? personally I had a similiar problem i had to physically remove the hard drive from the laptop, buy an adapter and plug it into my desktop. I had to do alot of hard drive repair scans and stuff but eventually i was able to recover a good portion of the data. I saved everything to my desktop hard drive and re-installed Xp on my laptop. it is going to be very pricey to take it in and get repaired and they wont be able to guarantee to get your data back. you can cut your losses and buy a new laptop hard drive or take your chances taking your computer in. Best of luck in whatever you do.

Take it to a reputable computer repair company and hopefully they can revive the hard drive enough to extract the files that you need to save. There is a good possibility that the hard drive is no longer functional and if this is the case, you may not be able to recover any of them. I sure hope this is not the case! You didn't indicate what Operating System you are using? You could try hitting "F8" at boot and choose "Last Known Good Configuration" if you can get it to bring up the "BIOS" screen - (this is the screen that shows when you first turn your computer on - the video card, etc.) In future, I'd suggest that you back up important data at all costs - buy yourself an external hard drive and save a copy to it in the event that the one in your computer goes bad on you...you could also purchase a jump drive for the same purpose that plugs into a USB port on your laptop and use it for backing up those important files as well. I wish you the best of luck!