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Dell crashed,I think..Hard drive-0 unknown upon startup

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by rivrbyte

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Hi,
My friend has a DELL Desktop. He is not that computer literate, and sometimes I can hold my own, although I do not have a DELL, but a Compaq. He said that when he started his computer up, it sounded like an airplane.

I'm guessing a hard drive. He says he sees the DELL start up, then a prompt for F1 or F12 , Menu is gray. Then sees "Hard drive-0. Unknown." But no Blue Screen. Can not use the mouse and tower is making a ticking noise.

I asked him if he could get to Help and support to maybe go back to system restore,but he can not.

Before I go over there, just wanted to know what tasks I should try to get his computer up and running properly again. He has all his work projects, and Quick books that he's afraid he lost, and understandably freaking out. Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thank you! :-)

3 replies

by hal 9000

You'll need to pull the cover and make sure that the HDD Cable is connected properly at both ends, then check the power connector and try booting again. If it now loads up backup all of his data so you have a known good backup available to work from just in case.

If it doesn't work and you can hear the HDD going crazy and clunking away you need to replace the HDD and if the data is very important you need to take the broken HDD to a Data Recovery House and pay them the money to recover the data. This isn't cheap and your friend should have some form of DR Plan in place to prevent spending thousand of $ to recover what can be saved for a few $. Most likely all of the data could fit onto one Blank DVD and only cost a few cents to save the data.

But just to make sure go into BIOS and turn off the Dell Splash Screen and see if you get a message that reads something like [b]No Boot Device Found[/b] if you do the computer is no longer reading the HDD and how you proceed from this point is entirely dependent on what is on the HDD and how important the data is.

If it's ultra important don't even attempt to do anything to the HDD just replace it and send it away as if you mess with it and do more damage it's only going to cost more to recover the data from.

Col

by rivrbyte

Thanks,
The HD would just click and never boot into windows. We replaced the damaged PATA 20 GB with a new 300 GB hard drive,but the Dell System or Motherboard was not able to handle the whole 300 GB amount, so we used what was allowed...only 60 GB of the 300. What a waste of space! This Dell was way out of Warranty. So now we have to find a DATA recovery place to get some of it back,and not charge an arm and a face. Thanks!

by hal 9000

Than it is Programed to see it's called Disc Wizard and prepared a HDD for installation and overrides the BIOS. Unfortunately you need to run this first before installing the HDD.

But you can add a PCI to IDE Card and allow the system to boot from that and have the ability to use all of your new HDD. It's fairly cheap to do if you use a Promise Technology Controller as this is supported natively.

If you had of made any mention of buying a new HDD I would have warned you of Upper Size Limits that come with BIOS. Perhaps I should have done so anyway when I told you that you had a bad HDD I just expected it to be replaced UG.

Col

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