That error is normally associated with a bad hard drive. If you are comfortable replacing the hardware and have the Dell installation disks for your OS you can do it yourself.
Possibly. Remove the hard drive, mount it into a 2.5" external drive case ($10-20; newegg.com has many) and attach it to a working system by USB. You may be able to recover some or all of your files.
I just had the same problem on a Dell laptop that was out of warranty. I bought another hard drive (Western Digital 320GB for $49 from NewEgg.com) and was able to copy the old hard drive over to the new hard drive and retain all my files. The new hard drive booted fine the first time. I used Acronis software to clone the hard drive using an external dual hard drive dock. Total cost for the new hard drive and dock was about $100.
jackshack
6.4K Posts
0
November 8th, 2008 19:00
That error is normally associated with a bad hard drive. If you are comfortable replacing the hardware and have the Dell installation disks for your OS you can do it yourself.
ejn63
9 Legend
•
87.5K Posts
0
January 25th, 2010 16:00
Possibly. Remove the hard drive, mount it into a 2.5" external drive case ($10-20; newegg.com has many) and attach it to a working system by USB. You may be able to recover some or all of your files.
ljbomba
1 Message
0
January 25th, 2010 16:00
I had the same problem just happen with my computer. Is there ANY way to recover the lost files before restoring the OS? THANK YOU :)
magic32lakers
1 Message
0
March 22nd, 2010 14:00
I just had the same problem on a Dell laptop that was out of warranty. I bought another hard drive (Western Digital 320GB for $49 from NewEgg.com) and was able to copy the old hard drive over to the new hard drive and retain all my files. The new hard drive booted fine the first time. I used Acronis software to clone the hard drive using an external dual hard drive dock. Total cost for the new hard drive and dock was about $100.