Woe is me (and my laptop)

Puppyraiser

PFG, Picture Framing God
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Today I was working on my laptop Dell Inspiron computer. I walked away and came back to find it doing 'tick tick, tick, tick'...
I started it up again (which I find frequently cures a lot of computer problems) and got "Start DST short test failed. No diagnostic Utility Partition found. Error # 1000-0146"
So I turned it off again and let it sulk for a while. When I turned it on, I got "Unit 2: Dst log contains previous error(s)
Error 1000-0141 No drive detected."
This sounds really serious. Oh yeah, I can't find the package of disks for it... :(
HELP HELP HELP!!!
 
My husband's three year old Inspiron's hard drive bit the dust two months ago. It did the "no drive detected message", we bought a new hardrive and reinstalled everything. If it's not detecting the drive the disks probably don't matter.

Sorry about your laptop.
 
Is it still not detecting the hard drive?

That's a pretty serious problem and likely means the hard drive is about to fail completely, if not already.

If you can get it to boot up, back up your data as soon as possible.

Mike
 
Hopefully it's under warrenty, cause if it is you're going to need it..

You can google your error #'s and find out what other people did who've encounted this kind of problem with a Dell laptop. I did, and most it seems were resolved by Dell sending out a new drive.

You could try opening up the laptop and re-seating the drive and any cables that connect to it to see if it's a loose connection.. tinkering with the internals of a laptop is not for the faint of heart, but usually the hard drive is fairly easy to get to.

But again, I would call Dell and have the person on the phone (who's probably from India or Croatia or somewhere) run through Dell's checklist.. some of their error codes are a little ambiguous.

Good luck!
 
I agree with the others, it does sound serious. But, I would be a little reluctant to even try to back it up at this point. I would have the nagging fear that whatever the problem is, it would completely corrupt the hard drive.

My suggestion is to run (not walk) to a local repair facility and explain the problem. Unless the gremlins inside your box have maliciously formatted your drive, chances are that most (if not all) the data is still still in tact.

The repair gurus should be able to copy it onto a new drive (if necessary), then fix whatever the real problem is.

It's probably not the cheapest solution, but losing data, to me, is a lot more traumatic than shelling out a few bucks for hardware.
 
It is off to the Computer Doctor tomorrow. He thinks he can pry the data out of its clenched teeth... And of course a new hard drive. And I have sworn a blood oath to back up every night!
 
NON-TECHNICAL FRANKENTHREAD ALERT!!!!


Ellen! If you 'back up' every night, you need to change the name of this to 'Whoa is me'! You're liable to back up into a chair or something.

Dang! I forgot you have The Voice that can move barstools and stuff...you need the shirt that Signals and Wireless (PBS stores) sell. The one from the BBC series, 'Rumpole of the Bailey'. It has, "She Who Must Be Obeyed" in a nice script on the front.
 
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