C
Chet
I have another question in regard to my previous post on this subject.
The day before the laptop crashed I had gotten a msg saying the "hard
drive was almost full". Could this possibly be the source of a crash
like this? No start, no safe mode, just the "i'm sorry windows
couldn't start screen". It seems like there would some other msg
prior to a total crash that you'd get that would tell you something was
critically wrong?
Thanks,
Chet
I have a Dell M700 laptop with XP Home on it. I was using it yesterday
and it suddenly crashed today. It won't go into safe mode, and the
diagnostics say things like erro code: 1000-1042 Drive Self test failed
status byte 79.
I called Dell tech support and they say it is either a corrupted
operating system or the HD has failed. The odd thing is that the only
message was that "the hard drive was nearly full". There was no
buzzing of the HD and plus the laptop is only 1 1/2 yrs old. I realize
the HD could fail even at 1 1/2 yrs.
It just seems odd that there would be no symptoms prior to total
shutdown and failure of the laptop. Is it likely that the hard drive
being full could cause such symptoms? I would think there would be
warning messages that you can write to the HD if it was in fact full to
capacity.
I used the original cd's to try to get into 'repair mode' on win xp but
I just get a dos prompt when I do that. I thought maybe one can use
the 'restore' mode to actually do a fix but when I do that XP seems to
want to 'format' the HD. (Which I could do.)
Is there any other way to fix this and restore it to it's prior
condition since I'd rather not have to reinstall all the pgms I had on
it. One would think XP would be self-healing and auto detect defective
files and then just be able to repair itself. The Dell techs think
that often you get msgs saying the HD is bad when it's really just a
corrupted operating system.
Any thoughts?
Thanks Chet
The day before the laptop crashed I had gotten a msg saying the "hard
drive was almost full". Could this possibly be the source of a crash
like this? No start, no safe mode, just the "i'm sorry windows
couldn't start screen". It seems like there would some other msg
prior to a total crash that you'd get that would tell you something was
critically wrong?
Thanks,
Chet
I have a Dell M700 laptop with XP Home on it. I was using it yesterday
and it suddenly crashed today. It won't go into safe mode, and the
diagnostics say things like erro code: 1000-1042 Drive Self test failed
status byte 79.
I called Dell tech support and they say it is either a corrupted
operating system or the HD has failed. The odd thing is that the only
message was that "the hard drive was nearly full". There was no
buzzing of the HD and plus the laptop is only 1 1/2 yrs old. I realize
the HD could fail even at 1 1/2 yrs.
It just seems odd that there would be no symptoms prior to total
shutdown and failure of the laptop. Is it likely that the hard drive
being full could cause such symptoms? I would think there would be
warning messages that you can write to the HD if it was in fact full to
capacity.
I used the original cd's to try to get into 'repair mode' on win xp but
I just get a dos prompt when I do that. I thought maybe one can use
the 'restore' mode to actually do a fix but when I do that XP seems to
want to 'format' the HD. (Which I could do.)
Is there any other way to fix this and restore it to it's prior
condition since I'd rather not have to reinstall all the pgms I had on
it. One would think XP would be self-healing and auto detect defective
files and then just be able to repair itself. The Dell techs think
that often you get msgs saying the HD is bad when it's really just a
corrupted operating system.
Any thoughts?
Thanks Chet