laptop is not booting from harddrive ?

[Guest]

I am having a problem with the hardisk of laptop.
laptop : DELL inspiron 500m + Win Xp.

It just hungup while working and since i cud not close the application nor
use the power button to shut it down, i just pulled out the battery.
After this the laptop never booted up !
It kept reporting that no bootable device was found..

Then i inserted the XP install CD that came along with laptop and then it
reported that a pervious installation was damaged.. for which i selected the
option to repair.
It went on fine.. and now i can see all my data and everything was intact.

But the problem now is that when i take out the CD, and restart the laptop,
it wont boot at all.. it keeps saying that no bootable device is found.
However in this situation if i put the same installation CD, it boots up
normal and it can now sense the harddrive and all devices and works normal.

It is just that it wud not boot up from hard drive.

Please suggest what should i do.

Thanks a lot for help.

 

[pickluh]

It sounds like your HDD has crashed. If you have access to another PC
with internet access, look for and download a pogram called gwscan 5.11
Its freeware and a very handy DOS-based program. I belive there is a
..bat file that will write you a bootable CD since you probably don't
have a floppy in you laptop. Run an extended scan. If there are just
logical errors, it will usually repair them, but more impotantly it
will tell you if you have a bad drive. If it (the HDD) reads okay, try
running a repair with you windows CD if gwscan didn't corect the
errors.