Internal hard dsk drive not found

Hi!


Yesterday, when I was working on my Vostro 1500, suddenly it blocked.

The screen froze, I could only move the cursor. It wasn't the first time that happend.

I turned off the power, and then it failed to boot and gave me some error messages.

This is what I got when it started to boot: A black screen with: "Internal hard disk drive not found. To resolve issue, try to reseat the drive."

And that's what I did. I removed the HDD and put it back in. Everything seemed to work again. But I didn't trusted it completely, so I started making a new back-up form my system via Windows Vista's back-up. But after the back-up was finished, I left my computer running for a while, but when I came back, it had fainted again and gave me the same error message as before.

I also get this error message, underneath the previous one: "PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable" and "PXE-M0F: Exiting Broadcome PXE ROM"

When running the setup utility (F2-button), I get, in the HDD-section: "Primary hard drive: {none}."

When running the onboard diagnostics (F5-button), I get: "Error code 0141" and "Error code 2000-0141" and "No drive detected".



When I tried to put my HDD in the laptop of my girlfriend, this laptop could recognise my HDD (it could give me the serialnumber), but it couldn't boot from it.

When trying the HDD from her computer in my laptop, I could get Windows to start up, but not completely. It gave some Windows error messages.



So, you can see my problem above.
I basically have these questions:

* Do I need a new internal HDD?
* I was able to perform a back-up via Windows Vista's back-up system onto my external HDD. So, do I still have all my personal files, and more important, all my programs?
* Do I need to get a new Windows dvd for installing an operating systmem onto that new internal HDD (if I need one?) or can I just use the Windows dvd that I got with my laptop?


Regards,

Jurgen

 

1. Yes, your hard drive is failing and needs to be replaced.
2. You may or may not have all of your files. Backup off of a failing disk is sort of a crap shoot.
3. You can use the Windows DVD that came with the laptop (assuming it's the Dell OEM disc.)