The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Replacement hard drive + DSR

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by jameshurrell, Sep 9, 2009.

  1. jameshurrell

    jameshurrell Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    32
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    I have an old Inspiron 1300 laptop (Win XP Home) that came with the DSR tool but NO MEDIA reinstall discs. It is also out of warranty. The laptop will not currently boot - it blue screens with "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME". Here's what i've tried:

    1) Cannot get past Blue Screen stop error in anyway (tried all available Windows options)
    2) Attempted to access the Windows XP Recovery Console on a spare Windows CD I have to run "chkdsk" or repair the boot system - this also resulted in a Blue Screen
    3) Ran Dell hardware diagnostics on hidden part of hard drive - these systematically fail when testing the hard drive on bad sectors. The hard drive has basically "gone bad" - some of its sectors are corrupted and unrecoverable (the parts that have gone bad are the parts where the Windows files are stored it seems - hence cannot boot Windows).
    4) Ran Knoppix Live Linux OS to attempt to access my data files - SUCCESS - have copied across what I want to keep via my internal network.
    5) I have run the DSR, but this also fails with a bad sectors error (not surprising)

    I'd like to put in a cheap replacement 2.5" IDE drive to get it working again. However, how do I re-install it given that I have no media from Dell and the DSR resides on the defunct drive? I can copy the DSR parition to a network drive, but how whould I use the .GHO image?

    Thanks.


    Any pearls of wisdom are welcomed. I'd like to avoid forking out for a copy of XP...
     
  2. Robin24k

    Robin24k Notebook Deity

    Reputations:
    274
    Messages:
    1,700
    Likes Received:
    5
    Trophy Points:
    56