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

*ANY* drive will work just fine.

I'll install the drive for gas money, and you can get *ANY* drive you want to get.

and I'll plug your old laptop drive into my workstation and attempt to pull the data off of it if you'd like.

b

If your drive is ntfs formatted (most likely unless you are running windows 98) then your DOS floppy boot would not see the drive.

You can try booting with your windows 2000/XP CD as if you were going to install the OS. It should "see" your drives partitions if the drive is good.

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

Here's what I get when I try to boot.

We apoligize for the inconvenience, but windows did not start successfully. ya da ya da.

Try starting in the last known configuration. Then there is a countdown clock before it trys.

Windows logo comes up, some page about dumping physical memory.

I made a boot disk in the MY Computer Format window. Is this the right boot disk? When I boot with DOS disk and try to go to C:\ I get Invalid drive specification.

Anyway to bump start a drive, bounce it off the wall, lol.

The files were pretty much backup files. That's not that big a deal.

So you're saying any laptop drive will fit? Some of the pictures I was looking at, looked physically different. Any suggestions on a good source for a new drive, good and cheap prefered.

Thanks Again, Don

yep. something in the start-up phase in windows is crashing, thats why you get the physical memory dump....and the blue screen :joy:

if you need data off of that drive I can help you get that off...

reinstalling windows *MIGHT* be a answer, but if that data is important, i wouldnt risk it.

your data is still good, but the XP install is not booting correctly, for one of a thousand reasons (solar flares)

b

I had a similar issue with my desktop PC where the thing would try to boot, then die. With a DOS setup floppy, I could see the C: drive and stuff on it, but it wouldn't boot. So I took the drive to my buddy's house to try at least to back up some pics I had on it. When my drive was connected to his computer as a slave, his Norton Antivirus program went crazy. So we scrubbed the drive with Norton and about 2500 files were infected. After cleaning, the drive worked fine in my PC, and I immediately bought an Antivirus program.

Good Luck,

Spoke

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"

I had just run my spy ware and virus programs a couple days ago, just found some cookies no viruses. Most of the time I just go to email and 914club, I do click on some of the links the guys post.

Everytime I try to access the C drive I get Invalid Drive.

I just pulled out the boxes that came with the computers with all the software disks. I haven;t opened those boxes in years. I can't find the Windows XP disks, I had a set for each computer, wtf. damn. Everything else is there, except the op disks. Even if I got a new drive, how to load it?

I have a real mess now, cause I opened even software box I had, did I put them in a special place so I wouldn't lose them, I don't think so. So guess I'll go clean up the mess.

What now, Don

well if you need me, pm me or go to my link and fill out a service request.

I found the disk, yay.

Anyway, put it in the D drive and started it up. I just kept doing the same thing. I let it cycle thru a couple of times, should I just leave it in until it catches?

The light on the D drive did come on and I could hear the disk spin up.

Thanks for the help Guys, I really appreciate it.

Thanks Don

Same thing happen to me around three months ago. Any 2.5" drive will work, and with the XP install disk you should be rolling in no time.
I tryied the XP repair option and it never worked, it would start to repair then dump me to a C: promt.
Though I could hear my drive physically clicking, like a scratch record. I´m pritty sure it´s a goner(no back-up, and not worth a $G to have the data recovered)

ask Z, his drive was clicking and I got everything he needed off of it for....well free.

b

I´ll be in KY the week before Easter visiting my folks. I´ll drop you a line, I know I´d sure love to recover that 40gigs of porn
I mean the pictures of friends and family