Hi tonkman,

2000-0146 error is related to hard drive. I’d suggest that you follow the steps mentioned below and check if you are able to switch on the system.

1. Switch off the computer. 
2. Disconnect the AC adapter from the system.
3. Remove the battery from the computer.
4. Press and hold down the power button for 15 seconds.
5. Then connect back all the peripherals and check if you are able to switch on the system.

If the system boots up then you can back up the data. If the system does not boot up then you will have to contact a local tech to recover the data and then go for new hard drive.

Inspiron N5010 comes with 2.5 inch hard drive. It supports both 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM hard drives with capacity ranging from 160 GB to 500 GB.

Use a Linux Live CD/USB and an external hard drive. Boot from the CD/USB and manually copy all the files you want. See Windows Reinstallation Guide/Data Recovery of the Hard Drive Using Fedora:

http://philipyip.wordpress.com/dell-community-forums/

You should then replace your hard drive; for hard drive replacement I recommend a Solid State Drive, this will give you optimal performance and the system will respond much faster than it did with the conventional hard drive. However the price per GB is higher and if you need a lot of storage than the price of the SSD may be too high. Pick depending on your needs, speed, storage and cost. Crucial is a good place to look for example:

http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts.aspx?model=Inspiron%20N5010&Cat=RAM

Once you have replaced the hard drive perform A Clean Install of Windows Vista or 7 depending on what OS got shipped with your system. See page 8 (Windows 7) or page 143 (Windows Vista) of Windows Reinstallation Guide for more details.

Thank you all for your replies and help. I have taken the drive out and placed it in a external 2.5 harddrive case and the strange thing is i can access all the files on the drive?! there is a partition called recovery but its empty. Does being able to access drive mean  the drive is okay?? if so for how long??

thanks again

If you can access the files, back it up NOW.  You may not get many more chances.

You may need to take ownership of the files to access them.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753659.aspx

The Dell recovery partition is locked nowadays, at least when viewing in a standard Windows environment. Like another poster said, backup your data immediately to another hard drive, usb drive, optical drive DVD, etc.

Thanks for the information and replies. Since, you can employ Remo Recover software capable enough to retrieve data from hard drive with error code 2000 – 0146.

Just pick out the hard drive and try it on another computer to see whether it can be used functionally.

If it can still work well, just copy all your files out and back them up well.

But, if this drive also gets some problems, you’d better apply some data recovery tool like Recuva, iCare Data Recovery Free and Power Data Recovery and more to restore all your wanted files back.

No matter which tool you choose to use, you’d better act carefully and do not write anything new on it in case of data loss.

Note: Never try to save all wanted data on only one drive again in the future in case of similar data loss problems.