Hard drive problem? Can you help me diagnose it?

So, rdunnill, are you confirming that  the hard drive is dead, that this is the problem?
I assume so but i want verification if possible before I go buy a new one.

If you have an earlier image, restoring that should bring back Windows. I'm not familiar with Paragon, though.

Can anyone CONFIRM that the info given here is indeed a hard drive problem and might not be something else?

I encountered two problems like you describe that were due to failing power supplies, but this one could be the hard drive.

If it were me doing this, I'd be swapping in known good parts to isolate the problem, but not everyone has these parts to spare.

Thanks for the feedback.

It amazes me that after all these years the morons at Microsoft still can't give you clear error messages that explain what is wrong when you get the blue screen errors.

Seems to me it shouldn't be that hard to run some diagnostics and then simply state what the problem is, in English.

Furthermore it would be nice if the Windows recovery tool would actually allow you to BROWSE and open repair files instead of just "set up information" files.

In my experience, hard drives are not lasting as long as they used to. It's an issue for hard drives in general, and is not limited to Dell. 

Come to think of it, I did have a bad hard drive in a brand new Precision 370 workstation, and weird problems like slow logins resulted; running the diagnostics found a bad sector, and my employer's tech department RMA'ed the drive for a new one and the problem was solved.

Note that Vista and later versions of Windows are much more sensitive to hardware errors than XP was.

Well no one seems to be able to tell me based on Windows cryptic error messages whether my hard drive is dead or not.

But based on the diagnostics finding bad sectors (?) and the drive not being detected and not being able to get anywhere with the Recovery Disk - can't re-install or repair Vista, etc - I am assuming the hard drive is dead and buying a new one.

I'm going to start a new thread on this as I don't know if anyone will see it and respond here, but CAN I indeed re-install Windows Vista from the Dell Reinstallation DVD that came with my XP430?
I read in one place that I'll have to call Windows help to get a new key (the old one won't work), I read somewhere else that I'll have to call DELL for the new key, and somewhere else I read that neither will work and I'll have to buy a new copy of Vista.

Do you know which of the above is true?

Thanks for your reply. Was pretty sure it is dead but just wanted some confirmation since I am new to this dead hard drive stuff. (In 25 years of computing this is my first dead internal hard drive!) I've used mostly Dells so that's a good stat.

Yes I guess I HAVE been lucky when I think about it!

I tend to replace my computer every 4 - 5 years and who knows if it's good or bad - but it seems to have been good, I leave it on most of the day and turn it off every night.

And I don't play games - that's probably a factor that reduces the life of computers.

pdsnickles

Happy to have helped.

If this is your first internal hard drive failure in 25 years, you sure have been lucky. :emotion-2:

Bev.

pdsnickles

You are probably right, have always switch off all our systems at night, or when away from the house/office and pull the plugs from the outlets.

But, 2013 and so far 2014 has started off bad, 2013 cost us a new motherboard on a desktop and our router, seems like the underground phone lines took a hit and 2014 another desktop's PSU shorted out, was there and heard the loud 'pop', when it was switch on, it also took out the motherboard, just finished the repairs Wednesday, guess this was caused by me using a cheap XClio power supply while building the desktop, all the HD's were fine :emotion-9:

Ain't computers fun. :emotion-5:

Bev.

Thanks for your reply. Was pretty sure it is dead but just wanted some confirmation since I am new to this dead hard drive stuff. (In 25 years of computing this is my first dead internal hard drive!) I've used mostly Dells so that's a good stat.

Hard drives don't seem to be lasting as long as they used to; I replaced two last year and neither was more than three years old.

Dell doesn't make its own hard drives, so this is not a reflection on them.

Another perhaps dumb question but hey I've never done this before so...

When I install the new hard drive, someone told me to add the drivers from  the Dell page re my XP430 one by one with system drivers first.

However, I plan to restore the programs etc of the broken drive through an image I took of it about a year ago.

So in that case, I do NOT have to add drivers at all, right? or do I?
Wouldn't the drivers be part of the image?
I'm not really sure as I have never used an image to restore before.