No Boot, no safe mode, reinstall disk doesn't find OS

Hi BoredWithHourGlass,

0142 indicates that the hard drive has failed and needs replacement.

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I was also wondering if there was any way to run the hard disk as an external on a different DELL computer?  i.e. to check it for errors using a working system ?  are there any cables or connections available at a reasonable cost?  I believe the error message that there are problems with the integrity of the disk, but I'm not really convinced that the disk itself is dead.....  I just have the impression that the software has got its little bits and bytes scrambled and mangled.

thanks

Turning off the power and rebooting yet again off the DVD brought back the possibility to get a cmd window.   Tried chkdsk C: (without the /F)

this starts up with the message:

type de système de fichiers est NTFS

le nom de volume est OS

warns that I didn't tell it to /F and says it's executing "en mode lecture seule" (which is what I intended for now)

it then came up with 1% effectués <54532 enregistrements de fichier sur 338880 traités> very quickly

but has since done nothing at all...  though the disk light flashes every couple of seconds.

Googling around forums suggests that it is not unknown for CHKDSK to hang because of software issues.  Any more advice before we have to try reformatting the disk or give up and buy a new computer ?

thanks very much

Hi there,

Yes, I just want to check the disk using a working system....  but I don't see how to do it.  I don't want to simply replace the disk in a different laptop and try booting, even if I can lay hands on a suitable laptop.  So yes, I just want to access it, so that I can try to look at it and perhaps fix it.

You can ACCESS the hard disk as an external disk on another computer, but you cannot RUN Windows from an external disk.  If I were you, I'd replace the disk.  If you want confirmation of Dell's diagnostics results, get the diagnostics from the actual manufacturer of your hard drive to test it.  You might even consider testing it on another computer to eliminate motherboard/controller issues.

thanks flash1932 that helps.  Just out of interest, have you ever seen/heard of a fault like the one we have?  Could I be right that reformatting the disk and rewriting everything would fix it, or could these faults only arise if the disk is so sick it can be binned?  Obviously I'm basically trying to save data on the disk - various forums suggest that getting chkdsk to run for example can be miraculous..  T

You can just plug it into almost any desktop, or to plug into any computer, you can use an external "enclosure", something like this, then just access it like any external USB drive:

SATA/IDE to USB Adapter

Hello again,

I have managed to copy the entire HD using an external enclosure with no apparent errors.   I then ran chkdsk /f on it using the external enclosure on another pc.  This fixed a couple of errors, but I now get a Boot error message when I put it back in its original computer and the install disk can't repair it.  The internal hardware check still fails.

I also bought a new WD 500Gb hard disk.   This is recognised by the BIOS and the entire hardware checks out OK with this new disk.  However, when I try to install the vista OS from the DELL supplied disk I get a "cannot configure for your hardware" error message right at the end.  I have tried installing with the Vista SP1 stand alone update on a USB key and this doesn't help.  I believe that the old disk was SATA 2, but have tried installing an updated driver which didn't change anything.

any suggestions?  should I try reformatting the new HD from the vista installation disk? Should I have more than one partition or change the default partition information on the disk?  I now have six non-working versions of Vista on the new disk that I can't delete.... !  (which I used as supplied, without any reformatting)

thanks for any posts !

Thank you Philip, I now have a working computer again.  I'm going to report in some detail my problem and solution, because I can't find much on the web, I think this must be a common problem and the solution is not at all obvious for non-IT people like me.

The basic problem was a corrupted operating system; I think caused by stopping an update/reconfiguration incomplete when the computer looked like it had hung.  This was compounded by removing the battery to stop the computer which seems to have damaged the disk in the region where the OS is written.  Modern youths are very impatient !

Firstly, I didn't follow the instructions to reinstall the OS on the disk.  As the disk showed up as faulty, and chkdsk hung at 1%, it was not at all obvious that this would do anything other than make any data on it harder to read.  I bought an external disk caddy as suggested above (thanks for the tip)  (these are very cheap and even available in my local supermarket) which allowed me to read the disk without any difficulty.  I backed up all the data, chkdsk ran and fixed a couple of errors.  Reinstalling the disk in the laptop still showed up hardware errors and the OS was still not found by the reinstallation disk.

I therefore removed the hard disk again and replaced it wiith a Western Digital 500Gb Scorpio Black disk. A hardware check then ran without fault.  However, I could not reinstall the operating system -Vista pro 32 bits SP1.  I tried without success to find the right driver.  The trick was to download the drivers from Intel and have the correct 4 files in the top directory of a USB key.  Thanks for telling me which files natakuc4, because I couldn't find the information anywhere else.  I also reformated the new disk and created a backup partition using the command window during the Vista installation (some hints on using diskpart and recommended settings would be helpful).  The sata driver had to be installed before windows not as a repair.   Only one USB port seemed to work.  I moved the key from one port to another and relaunched the driver search until it found it.  (the USB key directory never appeared).  (I am surprised I had this problem as my old Seagate disk was already SATA 2.)  Vista then installed, I then installed SP2 and started installing drivers downloaded from the Dell site.  It is actualy very difficult to know exactly which drivers are needed for what - some indication like "USB" or "ethernet" etc would be extremely helpful.  I couldn't install the video drivers, or use the Dell utilities until I had updated vista, then reupdated it, then  run the update program a third time!  A message like "update windows again even if you've just done it" would be much more helpful than "install system.core version 3.5.0.0 see your system administrator".  

Finally natakuc4, your help file is magnificent, but very hard to navigate on my tiny screen.  The links don't work in windows explorer either - you need chrome.  It would be helpful to have it split into several smaller files.  Thanks everyone.

Glad to hear it, but you should of been able to download the wiki as a pdf file and open it in adobe reader.

Initially I had it all as seperate wiki pages on the community but put it all into 1 word document as it was getting hard to edit, things were disappearing and people were saying the page was taking a long time to load.

If the downloads don't work, try this its the same pdf but as a compressed .zip file:

http://qrj1yq.bay.livefilestore.com/y1moi8ertT8e6zhvhByZHVkUNgNWJh2OPz3Y-Um5pUkjDExSuiWV4Ivr8W1gDlSTnP9iGgs0vlTLadwBKmdifdYfXc-PRymsmvEGPWTKGeKfjngpgGZj61zzQ/Wikies%20Beta2.zip?download&psid=1

Perhaps I should make it the main link. Also the SkyDrive should work fine on Internet Explorer (as its a Microsoft Service). The internal links should also work when the pdf is downloaded.