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POS Dell ruining hard drives or killing boot sectors?

M

markjs

Senior member
This lady who I work for has a Dell and it startd just booting to a black screen with a flashing cursor and that is all it does, so I checked the hard drive and it was all messed up and I though it was bad. So I put another hard drive, (used but works) just like the first except the new one is 40GB and the old 30GB, but both are WD Protege drives. The thing worked fine for a few boots then all of a sudden it does the same damn thing. I changed the drive to the secondary IDE channel but to no avail. I have never seen the like of it and I am stumped, but she is a sweet old lady and I really want to help her and get her back up and running. Thanks in advance.
 
Do you get any hard disk errors such as Operating System not found.... or is it just the cursor in the top left corner blinking?

Unplug all usb devices and see if it boots.

pcgeek11
 
Have you used the WD Diagnostics program on their website to actually test that the drive is bad? Burn the DOS program onto a disc (or USB thumb drive if your hardware supports it), boot into it, and run their scans on a disc.

What it sounds like to me is that the BIOS or IDE controller is screwed and corrupting data being put onto the drive. I just sent in a WD drive, where most of my data was fine. But it was just barely failing, causing the OS to become corrupt after a few boots. The WD test affirmed codes 07 (Cyclic Redundancy Check error) and 08 (Too many failed sectors for software repair).
 
I just get that cursor. I will try the WD software. The reason I figured the other drive for being bad was because much of the data on it was corrupted.
 
Originally posted by: markjs
I just get that cursor. I will try the WD software. The reason I figured the other drive for being bad was because much of the data on it was corrupted.
Click to expand...

Faulty drive controllers on a failing motherboard can cause this. I recommend, if you can, using another system to put the hard drive into and scan. If the laptop itself is bad, it could give a false reading that the hard drive is bad.
 
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