Strange problem with Dell C810 latitude – 5 years old, with Win 2000 pro.
My steps:
1. Starting position: Some sort of hard disk crash – wont boot, not even in safe mode, command line.
2. Booted from Win 2000 CD, tried Repair, no good
3. Booted Win CD recovery console, and ran “chkdsk /r” on all 4 disk partitions (took forever)
(C is system partition)
C and E partitions: chkdsk reported “The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems”. D and F were OK.
4. Rebooted and got message “no bootable devices available”.
5. Went to BIOS, found out that no hard disk recognised (“none”), no CD-Rom drive recognised (“not installed”).
6. Tried (in desperation) other bootable CDs (UBCD, SystemRecueCD, SuperGrub etc). No good (well, the BIOS wont see them)
So what happened between steps 3 and 4? They were consecutive. Laptop was not even moved.
Any ideas appreciated.