Hey board, need a little help and you guys have always been able to help. Here's the situation, Friday night shutdown like normal, same night ran Norton, Ad Aware, no problems... Saturday morning I turn on the computer, Dell screen appears with loading bar... after that, all I get is a blinking cursor. Here's what I have:
Dell Dimension 8250 Windows XP Just received my new hard drive from Dell back in December because my previous drive died on me.
I contacted Dell, they're sending me a new hard drive. I think this was a quick fix, but I want to make sure before I give up on what was on my drive.
Here's what I've done since Saturday:
- Tried to hit "F8" during startup to load in safe mode, "F8" won't work. Only "F2" for Setup and "F12" for Boot Menu works. I get a lot of keyboard errors as well.
- Tried to repair windows through the Windows XP CD. Outcome: Said no errors with repair, still get blinking cursor.
- Ran a diagnostic through the Resource CD provided by Dell. Only received one error, Error Code: 1100:012a. I tried googling this code but the only site with this descrpition won't allow me access.
- Ran this command line in the repair a second time: CHKDSK /R. (Was in knowledge base on Dell's site) Ran fine, still get blinking cursor.
- Out of desperation (and maybe stoopidity! =P) I tried to re-install Windows XP but it said that there was already a version on my drive. I didn't partition my drives so I'm unable to load on a different partition.
- I did the check which checked the drive, and it passed. It shows the compacity of the drive (about 160 GB) and the available space (about 80GB). Which is where it was at before the blinking cursor appeared.
Based on all of this, and sorry it's alot, is there hope for recovering my files or should I just face the fact that my drive is toast and I'm going to have to just wait for the new drive and start all over again.