yesterday i took out my laptop hard disk and connected it to the desktop to try to transfer the info out, but it took a very very long time... so this morning i removed the covers to the hard disk and processor from my laptop and switched the laptop on to see what would happen. it turns out that it works! so i managed to transfer my data out from the laptop to the external hard disk. even now i'm typing this blog entry from the laptop.
it seems that the problem is due to overheating, since i did not do anything much but remove the covers from the processor and hard disk. so now the cooling pad has direct access to the internal parts of the laptop. i hope that this can hold up for some time.