Hi there,
My gf has an Inspiron 2600 with a 20GB HD that will lock up at a black screen right after the BIOS screen. I tried booting with the XP disc and booting into Safe Mode, but it hangs up at the same spot. The Dell Diagnostic disc was able to load and tell me that the HD is functioning normally after extensive read/write/seek/surface tests. Quick tests of the other devices did not find any errors either. After quitting the diagnostic program, it dumped me at a DOS prompt, so I "dir"ed the C drive and it told me:
1 file(s)
COMMAND COM 94 KB
Free Space 33.4 MB
Obviously, I should have a lot more files and a lot more free space than this, so now I'm at a complete loss.
Does this sound like a virus managed to repartition or reformat the HD, or am I just looking at a dead disk, no matter what the diagnostic tools are telling me?
There are some files I'd like to salvage off this drive if at all possible, so I only want to do a reformat as a last resort (and assuming I can get the XP disc to boot).
TIA,
B.
My gf has an Inspiron 2600 with a 20GB HD that will lock up at a black screen right after the BIOS screen. I tried booting with the XP disc and booting into Safe Mode, but it hangs up at the same spot. The Dell Diagnostic disc was able to load and tell me that the HD is functioning normally after extensive read/write/seek/surface tests. Quick tests of the other devices did not find any errors either. After quitting the diagnostic program, it dumped me at a DOS prompt, so I "dir"ed the C drive and it told me:
1 file(s)
COMMAND COM 94 KB
Free Space 33.4 MB
Obviously, I should have a lot more files and a lot more free space than this, so now I'm at a complete loss.
Does this sound like a virus managed to repartition or reformat the HD, or am I just looking at a dead disk, no matter what the diagnostic tools are telling me?
There are some files I'd like to salvage off this drive if at all possible, so I only want to do a reformat as a last resort (and assuming I can get the XP disc to boot).
TIA,
B.
