First of all, I'm not a super computer techie, so if you can help me, please keep the acronyms and jargon to a minimum...treat me like your grandmother who is using emial for the first time! (I'm not that bad, but still!)

I have a older Dell Latitude that won't recognize the hard drive. When I run diagnostics, I get the following:
Start DST Short Test
Test Results: Fail
Error Code: 1000-0141
Message: No Drive Detected

I googled this error and it basically sounds like I'm FUBAR. But, I thought I'd give this a shot. I have tried to run the diagnostics driver, but nothing. I keep getting a blue screen message, but it flashes so quickly I can't write anything down... something about Kernal Data and dumping memory.

I decided to forget it, just lose everything on it, delete the partition and start all over (I've had to do this once before, and until now, it worked like a charm.) Well, it won't let me delete the partition, but it won't tell me why. I tried re-installing XP again, and it won't let me do that either, again it won't tell me why.

So now, when I turn it on, I either get a black screen that tells me there is no recognizeable hard drive or and to press F1 to reboot or F12 for set-up, XP looks like it's about to start up, then a blue screen flashes and it starts to boot again, XP starts up, blue screen flashes, and so on...Why does my laptop hate me so much?! Please help if you can! Thanks!

You won't believe it but I got this problem yesterday at work while cloning a Dell Latitude. I reluctantly called Dell and they said exactly what you seemed to have learned as well, fubar

Noooooo!!!

I am now starting the Bathtubjen Relief Foundation...our mission is to raise money to relieve me of my misery caused by my evil laptop! If you would like to donate, please let me know!

No offense, but if you searched the forum, you would have seen i posted a solution to this about a year ago. http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforum...Test+nizzy1115
All you needed to do was run the chkdsk command and you would have been fine
Next time do a quick search

Thanks, but it didn't work. It runs for 40% then tells me that 1 or more volumes have an error which it cannot recover from! I'm back at square one.

Well, atleast that wasn't completly useless. You may have something wrong with your hard drive, thats why you have bad sectors in your hard drive. You could try a format and reinstall, but it probably wont work because of the bad parts of the drive. YOu may have to get a new hard drive for your your computer.

If this comp was in fact in the Bathtub that could explain a lot.
I will tell you what I would do for what its worth.
First I would go buy an inexpensive remote drive enclosure.
Next, and not to difficult,Granny, I would remove drive thats called fubar and put it in enclosure.
Hook up to any XP computer and see if my stuff is there.
Recover anything I can, pictures, music, letters etc.
Then, if the above works, find a new bigger hard drive to put in your comp. and use old drive for unimportant stuff.
Finally, take long hot bath.

My name is John, and I am a customer advocate at Dell headquarters. The error quoted above indicates that either your hard drive needs to be replaced or your motherboard does. I would be happy to help you determine which is the problem. The results of the chkdsk you ran would strongly suggest the drive and not the motherboard.

Please contact me at customer_advocate@dell.com and include your service tag. I would be happy to look into our support options and assist you in any way that I can.

John
Dell Customer Advocate