Well our dell desktop that is only a year old took a crap on us yesterday. My wife said it froze up while I was at the gym and she did the control+alt+delete function to get it to shut down. When she tried to turn it back on, it gives us the Dell boot screen and then goes to a black screen with a white flashing cursor at the top corner. I went into the BIOS menu and set it to defaults and the next time I tried to reboot, it went to another screen that appeared to be searching for drives. It said:
SATA-0: Installed
SATA-1: Installed
SATA-3: Not found
SATA-4: Not found
SATA-5: Not found
And then the screen just sat there like that and wouldn’t boot to windows. I am having the computer dropped off at a local computer shop, but I was curious what might be wrong with it. Is the hard drive dead? What might have caused this, a virus or something? We have Norton and a couple other spyware type programs, so I figured we were covered.
how many drives do you have? i’m guessing two and only two? were they configured as a raid? you should have bios settings for how the sata controller will see drives, depending on the board. could be a number of things hardware or software based… what OS is installed? if it’s going to a local computer shop, why do you care?
I think it is only one hard drive. When I look at the drives I only have one choice besides my DVD-RW and the drive just says Samsung and then a bunch of letters and numbers.
The default setup for the configuration is IDE, but I tried to change it to Raid and it didn’t fix it (don’t know what any of that means, I was just messing with it to see if I could fix it).
We have vista home premium for our OS. I only asked because the computer hasn’t been dropped off yet and I was considering just getting a new HD and trying to install it myself. Also, I don’t want the shop to give me the runaround and try to charge me for a bunch of extra stuff. I know there are a lot of computer guys on here and just wanted to know what to expect as far as repairs go.
Yeah, we are not buying another dell. This computer is exactly 13 months old and the hard drive is already dead.
it’s a toss up, you very well could have more than one drive… that sata installed message is an indication of physical hardware plugged into the controller … so unless you have a sata connected DVD or some whack shit going on, this is going to be the case. if you truly have one drive (which makes sense if it was booting IDE) then something is plugged into your sata controller… although, for all i know you do have an IDE drive and the sata controller settings are irrelevant… we’d need a picture of the motherboard to really be able to help you out. If the bill is cheap and it’s simply a replacement drive… then i wouldn’t call foul. If dude tries to sell you a new PC with a ‘data recovery’ fee, then i’d be skeptical.
It cracks me up when there is a hard drive problem and people bash the computer manufacturer for it. Dell didn’t make the hard drive. Chances are any computer you buy will have the same one or similar. Denounce Samsung if you are that upset with the failed component.
On that - it may not even be a mechanical hard drive failure. The operating system could of got damaged or corrupted from any number of things. It is a good sign that the hard drive is seen by the BIOS at least. Do you have the discs and knowledge to do a Windows repair installation?
Umm I think they sent them with the computer but I’m not sure. The OS was on it when we got it. I kept all of the stuff they sent though, so if they sent the discs I have them. Should I be able to just reformat and reinstall windows?
Cool thanks. I have taken stuff to this shop before and they treated me well so I wasn’t too worried and their hourly charges are pretty low (like $60 bucks).
Well if you have the Windows Vista disc, you can try to repair it before you reformat it. It saves you alot of hassle of reinstalling EVERYTHING.
I’m going from memory here, so there may be some stuff omitted:
put the disc in the CD drive and boot the computer.
It will ask to press a key to boot from CD (or it might just go straight to it w/o hard drive booting)
It will copy some files for the setup.
It will search the hard drive for a windows installation.
It should find it and give you the option to install fresh or repair
That is extremely condensed, but should get you rolling.