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Inspiron 6000 "Error Loading Operating System"
I know this error is likely a problem with the BIOS. I first encountered this about 4 months ago and took the laptop to a repair shop where they said the error was unrecoverable so I had to reformat the hard drive and reinstall everything. Now a few months later I get the same error. I downloaded the latest BIOS and re-flashed it - I know this is the correct BIOS to be using but still get the same error. I think everything is still there I just can't get the hard drive to be recognized and boot Windows.
I can't keep having to format and reinstall everything every few months. If I can't get it working this time without reformat I'm probably going to trash it. I will also become a Dell hater but I hope I don't have to since I've been using Dell laptops for over 15 years with mostly good results but it seems quality has gone down significantly in recent years.
Thanks.
ejn63
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May 3rd, 2009 18:00
Given the age of the system and the design life of a hard drive (which is five years), I'd bet the drive has started to fail.
Power on, press F12, load the Dell diagnostics and run the extended hard drive test.
ejn63
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May 4th, 2009 08:00
Try reseating the drive - -remove and reinstall it. If the problem persists, you have either a drive that's slow to spin up, or a bad mainboard - the drive is well under $100 to replace, vs $400+ for a board, so if the problem persists, try a new drive first.
bryanmichael
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May 4th, 2009 08:00
The system is less than 5 years but the last time the system crashed I thought it was the hard drive - ran all the diagnostics without error. Also ran them again this time and no errors.... Thank you for the suggestion but I don't think the hard drive is currently the issue (although it is getting old enough to fail but it seems to be working according to the tests).
The thing that gets me is that the hard drive never gets accessed when I boot - hard to be 100% sure on this but I think there is a problem with the BIOS / system finding the drive to boot off of. I double checked the boot parameters and like I said I re-flashed the correct BIOS (it was already the latest version). The hard drive passes all extended tests...
Anything else I'm missing?