Hi syschat community

I need a little help, my hard drive will not boot up on my Dell Latitude CSx laptop not sure what is going on. It goes through BIOS check and goes into loading windows NT 2000 Prof but as it nears the end of loading at the very end it makes about three scratchy sounds from the hard drive and then immediately goes into Bios again repeating this cycle over and over but never
booting up windows 2000 fully. What can i do to remedy this ? any suggestions would be most helpful.

thanks ahead
best regards]
particle boy

It sounds like a hard drive failure, if possible try booting it in to safe mode and run SCANDISK.

If you know your hard disk manufacturer you can make sure the sound is of a failing hard drive for ex: Hitachi hard disk's various noises that may indicate a failing hard drive

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Sami

Hhhhmmmmm let me see, i took a listen to the hard drive audio clips from the link you put up and i do feel that if you edited them all together they would make a excellent 50's style hokey monster soundtrack LOL : ) They however funny did not match what i am hearing. The drive on laptop spins up and starts loading windows 2000 very quietly its ownly at the very end of windows 2000 loading up does it make 4 successive light scratchy noises and
go to a black screen and then back into Bios screen. I wonder if its a graphics driver that failed or something. I don't have any discs since i got the laptop third hand from my brother, who also got it second hand from his company. I cannot boot into safe mode since windows will not load up,
Not sure what to do. What is Scandisc ?

best regards
particleboy

I am a customer advocate here at Dell headquarters. I found your post and wanted to give you what help I can on this.

The scratchy noises you describe are the read/write heads seeking for something on the drive. Most likely there are bad sectors that have corrupted at least one required file for Windows to start up. Unfortunately, there is a chance that the drive itself is getting ready to completely die.

You might (and I stress might) be able to do a repair installation of Windows which should move the effected files to another, hopefully good, location on the drive. My recommendation, however, would be to get the drive replaced as it is probably on its last legs.

The Latitude CS systems shipped with 9.5mm IBM hard drives if you wanted to get a replacement. If you have any questions about how to replace the drive I'll be more than happy to help you out. I can be reached by email at [email protected] (please add 'attn: larry' to the subject to make sure it gets to me).

I hope this helps get it working again.


Larry
Dell Customer Advocate
[email protected]

Scandisk is a dos utility that will do a quick or full check of every sector on your HD and if possible repair them. Do you have a boot disk that will get you to dos mode? If not. Do you have another computer with the same OS that you could use to make a boot disk.
It's possible that you can find a utility on the net that will allow you to boot up in DOS mode so you can check your disk.
HD's are fairly cheap at newegg or geeks. I just bought a new 40 gig for 36.00. Best of luck.

wow, Dell just went up a notch in my books. First company i've seen do that in a long time

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