hard drive is done for...., need advice Options

[matt_bustos]

I just recently purchased a Toshiba laptop a week ago at circuit city and something is very wrong with it. Last night it froze while i was watching a movie and then I couldn't turn it off so i had to hold the power button down to turn it off. I turned it back on the next day and it had a black screen with an era popping up over and over. Mentioned something about the Intel celeron and it being unable to read or locate the harddrive. I spoke with a Toshiba rep. and this is what he informed me of. So i shipped the computer back to toshiba to get it fixed.

now here's my question. Can turning off a computer like that really mess up the hard drive to the point that it won't work?

[ThGreenMoFo]

I just recently purchased a Toshiba laptop a week ago at circuit city and something is very wrong with it. Last night it froze while i was watching a movie and then I couldn't turn it off so i had to hold the power button down to turn it off. I turned it back on the next day and it had a black screen with an era popping up over and over. Mentioned something about the Intel celeron and it being unable to read or locate the harddrive. I spoke with a Toshiba rep. and this is what he informed me of. So i shipped the computer back to toshiba to get it fixed.

now here's my question. Can turning off a computer like that really mess up the hard drive to the point that it won't work?

That's a standard feature on most, if not all, laptop and desktop computers. While shutting the computer down using that method is not really 'good' on the system it certainly can't cause major problems if done every once in a while; you'll lose whatever data you had open at the time though. So, no - outside some sort of bizarre 1 in a million circumstance, it's not possible that shutting down your computer that way would damage it in the way you are talking about.