Hard Drive Errors dimension 9200 series

Normally, Dell will replace the hard drive if it fails within the warranty period on the system with which it was shipped.  If you purchased an extended warranty which is currently valid, you may be eligible for this service.  Dell will not, however, assume responsibility for data recovery on the drive.  The story you might be hearing resulted from a number of Seagate SATA drives that had a bad firmware load.  For those drives, Seagate (not Dell) was replacing the drive and providing data recovery service if the drive had failed before the user could get a corrected firmware installed on the drive.  So far as I know, Western Digital has never had this problem.

You seem to have two drives associated with your system which suggests a RAID of some sort.  If your computer was shipped to you with a RAID, do you know which type it was?  The Dimension 9200 will support RAID 0 (striping) and RAID 1 (mirror).  The first distributes data between the two drives to speed up access to your storage volume and the second stores the same data to each drive so that the second acts as a back-up to the first.  Failure of either drive in a RAID 0 usually means loss of all data since neither disk has a complete copy of the data.  The same situation in a RAID 1 usually results in a message at boot telling you that the RAID is degraded, meaning one drive has failed and you are working on the back-up drive.  If you ignore the message for enough time, the second drive will eventually fail as well.

You could also have had the computer shipped with the two drives configured independently so that one would have had your operating system and the second would have been used simply as storage.  Starting the computer and pressing F2 during the self test will take you to system setup and you can see whether or not the SATA controller has been set to RAID On, or to some alternate setting.  If the computer was delivered with a RAID of either type the controller will be set to RAID On.

What disk configuration do you have, and to what configuration would you like to restore the computer?

We are only users helping users, not Dell employees so we can say what Dell is doing or not doing and which models. You would have to call Dell to inquire about anything like this.   However, with a four year old PC, unless you have an extended warranty I doubt that Dell will do anything.  If it were a more recent model and there was a global problem I would think they would take care of it.

The Ping noise, in this case, was probably a "head crash" on the hard drive.  When you get head crashes it can damage the read/write head and it can damage the spot on the disc where the head crash occured. 

You can order a replacement set of Discs (Windows and the Drivers and Utilities disc) from Dell  HERE

Many thanks fireberd and particularly JackShack for your responses.
Yes there are 2 hard drives with the raid0 array strip so the 2 drives are considered as the one drive.
Using my recovery paragon partition manager (v.8.5) I can still see most of the file structure seems to be intact, but if I put my external hard drive in it is no longer recognised by partition manager.
I had partitioned the drives with an extended partition holding 3 bootable and 2 storage partitions. Most of the error sectors I found though occurred on the primary partitions, what I set out to try to do at first was to identify where those bad sectors were; isolate them as unallocated after moving around my bootable areas. But that didn't work out as parttion manager hung moving the data when it hit the bad sectors so it wouldn't complete the processes (I did try other parttition tools, but they did not recognise the partitions I assume because of the raid arrangement).
Amongst various other things I attempted to use some of the tools that seem to be around for identifying; then possibly resolving bad sectors. Reading one of the sites it suggested the failing sectors could be added to a g-list/p-list that computers have of bad sectors they can avoid using.
For example :
I downloaded and wrote iso disc for the SalvationData hd recovery iso file but this only booted up to the loading page then hung.
I downloaded the DOS CD version of the Data Lifeguard Diagnostics from the Western Digital site, but this doesn't seem to be a self boot disc so requires some way of invoking from the disc drive which I cannot (or don't know how to) do without an operating system or utility or even access to native DOS command prompt (but there again I would admit I am not certain which drive I would need to change to for the cd-rom reader as it has shown as different drives when I have been watching DOS driven processes using it) to allow me to do that.
At the moment I am using a disc loaded Ubuntu system to access the internet etc.

Ideally I would like to be able to try to gain access once again to any of the extended partition bootable systems that partition manager says are there, so I could try to salvage parts of the discs (like I suspect most people have there are some time limited installations from places like GOTD I'd like to try to save).
I concede though eventually I'm probably going to have to wipe the whole computer then try again to isolate off the bad sectors which is why I'm trying to make the restore to factory setting disc from what now seems to be my last hope of the copy I made of that partition on my external hard drive.
But now having had the experience of the extra problems this raid strip array processing causes at situations such as now I'd prefer to ditch that with any reconfiguration.

Have tried to cut the story down to what think are the main details, my technical knowledge is not that extensive but any help would be gratefully received.
Thanks again.   

Recovery from this situation will be severely problematic.  Normal recovery programs will likely have difficulty retrieving data from "bad sectors" because the program isn't dealing directly with the disk.  It is dealing with the array which must translate the directions of the recovery program to the actual disk layout.  Many recovery programs deal with bad sectors by increasing the number of attempts to read from them; this doesn't work very well with a RAID 0.

I also believe you are going to need to wipe the disks and rebuild the array.  What I would first try to do, however, is to install a third hard drive, install Windows to it in the RAID mode (but only to the single drive) and see if I could read the array with the normal Windows tools, such as Windows Explorer.  If successful, this would allow you to copy any data that resides in an undamaged section of the array so you don't lose so much data.  You could also attempt to use a disk imaging program that will see the array.  I normally use Acronis True Image, but there are likely others that will do as well.  Acronis allows you to boot from the CD/DVD drive and has a driver that will see the array (provided you use a recent version - mine is v11).  You then attempt to secure an image of your data folders.

A couple of things to think about; since you're dealing with an array, the disks themselves are not necessarily bad.  Once you have done what you can to retrieve your data you should use a diagnostics disk to thoroughly check each drive, including a good surface scan.  On the downloads page for the 9200 you will find an image of the diagnostics CD.  You need to use Nero or some other program (I use Express Burn by NCH) that can write an ISO file to make the actual CD.  Make that and use it to check your drives.  The second thing is simply a word of advice.  Anytime you are using a computer you should consider making a back-up of your drive now and again.  With a RAID 0 this is particularly important since the probability of a drive problem is multiplied by 2 - simply meaning failure of either drive kills your data, and any glitch in the RAID ROM can mess up the sector data even without a drive failure.

EDIT:  I missed the part the first time where you stated you are already using Ubuntu to bring the computer to a working state.  As it seems to see your array, have you tried recovering any files with it?

The Ubuntu Disk Utility shows the Dell Utility and the partitions on the Primary partition of the disk, the partitions in the extended partition of the disks unfortunately are just showing as free space. The Gparted utility of Ubuntu shows everything as free space.

It is though the partitions in the Primary area that are the ones where the bad sectors were stopping them booting, when the mbr/bcd booting selection menus were functioning the 3 extended partition bootable areas were for the most part working.

I did download Acronis True image as one of the things from the Western Digital site on a different computer but I didn't see it was possible to create a bootable CD from it, I'll have a look again at it to see where I missed that and see if I can get that running.

If I can get the computer up and going again in some way I do have back-ups in both entirely copied partition mirror form as well as those I made with the Macrium Reflect utility (in addition to loads of CD/DVDs of various items of data). Unfortunately the Macrium ISO recovery disc is one that will not boot on the computer in it's present state.

Have been out most of the day so not had time to try the 9200 downloads page diagnostics CD you suggested to check the drives, will hopefully have time tomorrow.

The initial message that appears with the disc drive/ports info. before the boot sequence kicks in does show the RAID Array  as well as the First Drive 0 in green with message as ok it is the Second Drive 1 that has a red message about errors on that (bit confusing to me as the bad sector identifier utility I ran showed the errors on the the first drive).

Thanks again for your help.

Just thought that the Dell Resource CD that came with computer has the diagnostics so ran them for the Express Check and then Confidence Test on the Hard Drives. The Express test reported Error as did the Confidence Test which showed the First of the Drives to Have Timeouts waiting for IRQ giving Error Codes 0F00: 1332 on a sequence of sectors (the response time was so slow after each error I only waited for 7 sequential sectors to report errors, but they seemed at a similar position to the bad sectors scans I'd done previously...roughly 5% into the disc).

I went to try to create a backup disc from the Acronis but the computer I'd downloaded it to has a Seagate drive so it wouldn't let me create a disc as I didn't have any Western Digital hardware on that computer.  

On Ubuntu it is possible to get immediate information there are 130 irrecoverable bad blocks the dell utility took about 20 minutes to report just one, then ask if you wanted to continue the test for each error  etc etc...and an age to cancel the testing when you had decided you had spent enough time getting not very far. Why can't the dell utility give the summary of how many bad blocks there are in the same speedy and uncomplicated fashion?