sorcerer
Active Member
- Reaction score
- 77
- Location
- Preston, Lancs, UK
I've got a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop in and I think the HDD is toast but just want to be sure.
POST begins but stops at a black screen with white text, saying Internal HDD Hard failure. Press F1 to continue, F2 for setup.
Booting from UBCD 5.2.8 and going into Parted Magic then GSmartControl, it reports no hard drive found. Using GParted to look at partitions reports no drive found. Using Hitachi's own drive diagnostics gave the same results, ie, no drive found to test.
Taking the drive out of the laptop, slaving it to my bench machine and going over the above procedures again, produces the same results which leads me to conclude that the drive is toast.
I then got distracted and rebooted my bench machine into Windows (XP Pro – I know, I know
) before disconnecting the suspect drive and found that Windows could see the drive and had allocated it a drive letter (F) - and looking at it from within Windows produced the message "The disk in Drive F: needs to be formatted. Format now?" - to which, of course, I said no. Easeus Partition Master, which is installed on my bench machine, refuses to see any partition or drive, either when run from within XP or from its boot disc.
So to summarise, Windows XP Pro ‘sees’ the drive but reckons it needs to be formatted, whilst all other tools refuse to see any drive or partition.
Is this drive ready for the bin or am I doing something wrong somewhere? It's an old laptop with an XP Home COA on the bottom, so I'm thinking that the cost of a new hard drive, my time, and XP's impending demise will put this machine beyond economic repair if I'm right and the drive is U/S.
POST begins but stops at a black screen with white text, saying Internal HDD Hard failure. Press F1 to continue, F2 for setup.
Booting from UBCD 5.2.8 and going into Parted Magic then GSmartControl, it reports no hard drive found. Using GParted to look at partitions reports no drive found. Using Hitachi's own drive diagnostics gave the same results, ie, no drive found to test.
Taking the drive out of the laptop, slaving it to my bench machine and going over the above procedures again, produces the same results which leads me to conclude that the drive is toast.
I then got distracted and rebooted my bench machine into Windows (XP Pro – I know, I know
) before disconnecting the suspect drive and found that Windows could see the drive and had allocated it a drive letter (F) - and looking at it from within Windows produced the message "The disk in Drive F: needs to be formatted. Format now?" - to which, of course, I said no. Easeus Partition Master, which is installed on my bench machine, refuses to see any partition or drive, either when run from within XP or from its boot disc.So to summarise, Windows XP Pro ‘sees’ the drive but reckons it needs to be formatted, whilst all other tools refuse to see any drive or partition.
Is this drive ready for the bin or am I doing something wrong somewhere? It's an old laptop with an XP Home COA on the bottom, so I'm thinking that the cost of a new hard drive, my time, and XP's impending demise will put this machine beyond economic repair if I'm right and the drive is U/S.
