Hard drive dead?

[scotagne]

My WD 40gig HD from my 1 year old dell system is not found after reformating and re-installing Windows XP. It first would only let Windows boot into Safe Mode in my new AMD box. It's now in a rebui;t Dell Dimension Wintel box. The BIOS is fine. Bummer. I got a new HD for my AMD, but i wanted to re-build this Dell and sell it. Is this a small violin playing? Thanks in advance.

 

[LatinJones]

Dell has an option to run diagnostics on the hard drive and I think it's ALT-D or Shift-D or maybe even ALT+SHIFT+D. Press that when you see the dell splash screen after powering on the computer. You need to have SMART enabled in the bios for this to work. It is usually enabled by default on dell machines.

If the drive is operating outside it's specs, SMART will normally report an error code. I'm not sure if it scans the disk for surface damage which sounds like the most likely culprit if it is partially booting. Might be time to pull out your favorite boot CD and try to recover the data...

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