OT- Laptop Hard Drive, Think it died Options

[DonTraver]

I've got a Dell Inspiron 2650 with a Hitichi Model DK23DA-30F Hard Drive. It won't boot up, when I use a boot disk it will boot to the A: drive in DOS, when I try to go to the C:\ drive, says it isn't there. Think the hard drive has failed, not sure, but I've never had one fail before.

2 questions.

1. Is the drive gone?

2. Does anyone know where I can get another one, I called Dell, they want $170 for a new drive. Looking on the web, I see a lot of drives 60 gig and below for under $100, just haven't found one with the right part number.

This drive is a 30 gig, a 20 gig would do, I don't download any music or stuff like that, mostly store pictures, files, etc.

I just backed up everything on the desktop, the laptop was my backup, lol. Murphy Rules.

Thanks, Don

[bd1308]

yeah but 'fdisk' in dos will see a non-dos partition...check it out.

c:/>fdisk

press Y at the prompt

at the prompt type '4' enter.

look for 'NON-DOS' partition.

if you see one, excellent. If you dont, just note it and quit out by pressing ESC.

Let us know what you see.

If you cant boot windows, and you have important stuff on it, dont reinstall windows over it. That data is *STILL THERE* but the boot files and/or boot sector is defunct.

b