I was on my laptop, Inspiron 8100, and everything was fine, no errors or anything. Took a break and when I came back my computer had a black screen. I tried to restart and it goes to the dell load page and windows XP pro page but that’s it. It goes back and forth between the two pages. A blue screen pops up between them for about half a second. I took a picture of it so I could read it, the error code is 0x000000ed. I searched Microsoft support for help and everything it told me to try failed. It says something about the volume having 2 un-repairable something or others.
Tried reloading XP and it wont work, wont even repair. I did, however, get it to test some functions...everything passed except the following (this is exactly what my computer said);

IDE Disk 0 - Confidence Test
Status: Fail
Status Code: DOS DDG-D Disk 193 066
Device: IDE_Disk_0
Test: Confidence_Test-Write_Test
Release: 1083 Module(s): Disk
Msg: Block 77358699: Address not found

I have no clue what this means...can you help? Do you know if ill be able to get any of my files off my hard drive? It is more important to get my data back than any other thing. Its very crucial.

I've seen this error many times on my Dell computer as well as other computers.
You are looking at a Hard Drive failure. From what I can deduce from your posting here it appears to be a hard drive that’s locked up and cannot read from any directory. This is the similar problem I’ve also faced in past and I was very much tensed regarding the data caz it had very-very important to be given in my company within few days. I tried many options to recover the data but the result was zero. I even went to recovery labs to get my data but they even refused to extract in that short duration. Finally, I could locate some Data Recovery companies in internet search and contacted SalvageData Recovery lab, an US based company. They had asked me to send the Hard Disk by post so I did. They are prompt and got my 92% data recovered in a few days time. I was very happy with the them caz it saved me from being kicked out from the company. I hope the lab may also help you, and you may be able to get your data back.

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