Primary hard disk drive 0 failure

I have been having problems with my Latitude Lap Top.  It happen to get moisture in it several months ago.  Took it to a repair service I deal with.  They said the HD and MB have signs of moisture on them.  Have been working with.  I fianlly got it to boot up!!  Get the same message!  I can access the BOIS and the clock is still accurate.  I know have hope if recovery of the Lap Top.  If I get a new HD will this save the machine??

DSLRIDER 

I have a Latitude CPi A  with a 4.86 gig HD.  I have prices some 10 and 20 gig HD's at $139.  Can I get one form Dell for a better price? They suggest not going more than 2 gig.  You say I may need a boot up disk once the HD is fix'd??  Should be able to boot up on its own shouldn't it?  The fact the I can access tht BOIOS would indicat the MB is fine.  Is this a safe judgement?  Thanks for the reply.

DSLRIDER

Karsten, the same happened to me, although I did not remove my hard disk.  Can anyone help me, as in with the same problem as below. I am unable to get into Windows. I have an Inspiron 1100 laptop that is brand new. Also, what is the cause of this error?

Continuation: Primary hard disk drive 0 failure

I have found that since last time, whenever I would plug in peripherals, I would receive the above message. And therefore, resulting in starting in dos without entering windows. I have since started to unplug all peripherals during start up, and reconnect them once in windows. My question is would someone tell me what needs to be done so that I can start up with all peripherals plugged in.

Inspiron 1100

-Sarah

Firstly, the ability to access the BIOS does not mean the mother board is fine.  It could very easily be damaged, and even one bad chip or connector could cause many kinds of different problems, including but most definitly not limited to random freezes and reboots.

Now, the real reason for the repeated hard drive failures affecting nearly every model of Dell Latitude or Inspiron:  cheap hard drives.  Over the years, Dell has, in an effort to make their laptops cheaper, resorted to buying cheaper parts where ever possible.  The result is some people end up with hard drives that go bad in 3 months (I just had to fix a brand new Inspiron about a month ago).

So the ultimate cause for any hard drive error: the hard disk is probably too cheap.

So one option for fixing a bad hard drive (this one I have done with repition on Inspirons and Lattiudes both running XP):
1) Remove the hard drive.
2) Boot the laptop up without it.  When it asks for a bootable media, turn it off.
3) Reinstall the hard drive.
4) Boot up in safe mode (if it asks you).
5) Once in Windows, go to 'run' and type "chkdsk /f" (without the "").  It may tell you to reboot in order to finish.  If it does, go ahead and reboot.  It will take several minutes longer than normal (depending on size of disk) to boot up, don't worry.  Once back in Windows, everything should be fine, for a while.  My advice is to make a back up frequently of any files you need, so if you have to replace the hard disk for good, then you will at least be able to save some of your files.

Best of luck to all.

Thank you Corey for responding. My laptop is now currently in working condition. What happened was my Inspiron needed an updated BIOS. Which frazzled me, since the laptop was just bought last month. Thank God it was a problem that did concern all of my ports. It truely is nice when technology works!  

-Sarah

Ok, I am having the same problem excpet, My computer is not a laptop it is a desktop and the error message it gives me is " Hard disk controller 1 failure, Hard disk controller 1 failure, Hard disk drive 1 failure,  Strike F1 key to continure, F2 to run the setup utility".   Then after that is done it says 

NTLDR is missing

Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to restart. I have encounterd this message before but some how got it to work, Now i can not do anything i have 4 drives that ive tried puting in no luck, They give me the same message i do not know what is going on and if someone could give me some help i would appreciate it big time, Email me at EMIN3M1@aol.com or im me at EMIN3M1  Thanks......  It also crashed before i do not know if this is what is causeing it, It was running XP but i took the drives out and formatted on i think what is windows 98, Would this be my problem ?  Should i format them on a XP based system ? thanks again to anyone that respondes

Message Edited by MnWIld on 02-03-2004 10:32 PM

ntldr is a system file required for all Windows NT based systems to boot, so that includes XP.  I will send you a copy of the ntldr file off of my machine here (along with a couple other files that may be missing), but I cannot guarentee that it will work.  You place it on the root directory of the drive (as in just loose on the C:\ drive).  If the drive is not bootable at all, even when connected to another functional machine, you may need to make a WINXP boot disk, and instructions on how to do that can be found here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314079&Product=winxp

And I believe that yes, the reason the drive cannot boot in XP is because you formatted it in Windows 98, a non-NT bases system, so it does not properly prepare it.

I realized after some thought that I'm not completely clear as to what you are doing right now.  Are you trying to install WINXP on a newly formatted hard drive, or are you maybe tring to use a WINXP restore CD, which may not be able to set up the ntldr file needed for the NTFS hard drive controller.  Or are you trying to boot it up as a slave or master to a pre-established drive?  Feel free to give me any information you can, as the more you post here the more likely you are to get the ultimate best solution.

Good Luck.