Firstly, the ability to access the BIOS does not mean the mother board is fine. It could very easily be damaged, and even one bad chip or connector could cause many kinds of different problems, including but most definitly not limited to random freezes and reboots.
Now, the real reason for the repeated hard drive failures affecting nearly every model of Dell Latitude or Inspiron: cheap hard drives. Over the years, Dell has, in an effort to make their laptops cheaper, resorted to buying cheaper parts where ever possible. The result is some people end up with hard drives that go bad in 3 months (I just had to fix a brand new Inspiron about a month ago).
So the ultimate cause for any hard drive error: the hard disk is probably too cheap.
So one option for fixing a bad hard drive (this one I have done with repition on Inspirons and Lattiudes both running XP):
1) Remove the hard drive.
2) Boot the laptop up without it. When it asks for a bootable media, turn it off.
3) Reinstall the hard drive.
4) Boot up in safe mode (if it asks you).
5) Once in Windows, go to 'run' and type "chkdsk /f" (without the ""). It may tell you to reboot in order to finish. If it does, go ahead and reboot. It will take several minutes longer than normal (depending on size of disk) to boot up, don't worry. Once back in Windows, everything should be fine, for a while. My advice is to make a back up frequently of any files you need, so if you have to replace the hard disk for good, then you will at least be able to save some of your files.
0 Comments