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

[SoCal Driver]

If you are using XP and you have a windows XP CD you can boot off that disk and possibly repair the issue. Once the CD boots it will come to a screen and give you 3 options. One option is to install windows, a second option is to repair you current installation. The repair option is the one that you want. You will hit "R" to take you into the repair console. Once you hit "R" the screen will go black and it will say something about choosing a keyboard. DO NOT hit anything, wait till it comes to a prompt and asks you what installation you want to fix. (you will only have one if you have only one version of windows installed) You will then press "1" and it will ask you for an admin password. Default there is no admin password, unless you set one up. If you did not setup an admin password just hit "enter" this will take you to what looks like a c prompt. C:\ type the following exactly to repair you windows installation. CHKDSK /R this can take anywhere from 30 mins to 2-3 hrs. Durring this time you will see your hard drive access light flashing, this is normal. The only time that you have to worry that it has frozen is if the light stops flashing for several minutes and it is xx% done. Again, dont worry if it goes from (say) 64% done to 51%, this is normal.

Hope this helps. And any size hard drive will work; 20, 30, 40gb....ect. as long as its a laptop hard drive (2.5") They can be found cheap, check www.pricewatch.com and search for "XXgb laptop hard drive"