Inspiron N5110 getting disk error

Holding delete key during boot did not take to Dell diagnostics either.

 If the hard disk was bad how come I could write and read it well on another machine...

aybe a naive question.. is the disk error for the hard disk or for the bootable DVD? Should I suspect the DVD drive since the ImgBurn seems to be successful repeatedly and I can read the DVD disk on another machine? (although the drive was working fine earlier...).

Does this machine allow booting from a flash drive?

Hold the D key when booting - it'll take you to the Dell diagnostics.  You've pretty much identified a bad hard drive you'll need to replace, but the diagnostics will confirm it.

Re-read above - hold the D key (NOT delete).  That will trip the diagnostics.

It's not your DVD drive that's suspect - everything you've posted points to a bad hard drive.

Thanks. Tried with D key during boot, with

and without OS disk in DVD drive.

Same disk error.

You are suspecting a bad drive in spite of the drive

working on another machine... OK..

I will take the drive out and run diagnostics on it on another machine. And try with a different drive on the Inspiron.

I hope its not a hw connection problem.

BTW, is there a way to bypass disk diagnostics and boot from DVD drive?

(since the hard drive is just a formatted empty disk sitting indidr).

Thanks for all the help.

Disconnect the hard drive and hold the D key at boot.  If you don't get to the diagnostics that way, you've likely a bad mainboard.

If you can, it's the hard drive that's bad.

Thanks. That's what I went ahead for, next.

Disconnected the hard drive and held the D key at boot.

DIagnostics came up with error

PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable

PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM

Reboot and select proper Boot device or insert Boot Media ...

Inserted 64-bit Win7 OS DVD disk.. starting loading Windows 7..and then exited.

All that's great. Thanks very much.

Then I took the hard disk to another Windows 7 64-bit (HP) machine; connected externally using SATA adapter cable.

Ran disk diagnostics. .no errors in file systems, no errors in sector checks!

So, ... is it a bad disk or do I have a different hardware connection or component problem on the Inspiron? Does the above error msg tell me anything other than indirectly pointing to no hard disk in the machine?

I guess only way to probably verify that is to put another "good" hard disk in Inspiron and retry?

( One other data point - Interestingly, it's a 600 GB disk when I first formatted on HP and tried on Inspiron. Now back on HP, it is showing as 195 GB free space. Must have written some system files? to it during Inspiron boot attempts earlier when I was getting disk errors).

Hard drive is toast - no sense wasting more time on it.  Replace it with a new one.

Well.. here is the update.

I tried a different hard drive on my Inspiron.

OS came up fine on DVD, after managing to keep rebooting to move it to boot from the DVD drive (I still couldn't get the function keys to work). System kept giving the PXE error until I got it to boot from the DVD. This time it acknowledged the new hard drive. Downloaded, Windows came up etc. so everything was fine.

Except..  at the end of the reboot I realized that still the function keys not working on the keyboard. In fact, none of the keys were working on the keyboard!! That explained why i could not earlier get the function keys to work! It didnt explain why I was getting PXE error which apparently points to 'trying to boot from the network.. typically next to hard drive in boot priority'.

Anyway, with this information, I went back to my old hard drive. and viola.. it worked fine!! (I used the on-screen keyboard)

As I suspected earlier, it was not the hard drive hardware that was the culprit, something else that did not allow Windows to find the empty drive.

Question remaining is: is it just a bad keyboard (ribbon connector looks ok)?

If so, what is its role in preventing the empty hard drive to be recognized by the OS in the first place?

And, what are flavors of issues can dump a 'PXE error - check cable'?

I am going to order the keyboard anyway.. but still would appreciate anyone's help to answer the questions above.

Thanks!

I guess non one yet has answers to my questions on the PXE Error. I will close this thread as I have a different thread pursuing the keyboard issue.