Member Avatar for vodooclown

Here's the problem and it's really annoying, I have a laptop it is a dell latitude c600 running windows xp professional, it was running fine until about a week ago it locked up so i had to reboot it, well when it started to load windows i noticed it was taking longer then normal, the battery light and the hard drive access light was constintly on no flashing, it goes through the loading process then restarts, boots up with the dell splash screen loads the goes to a cannot find hard drive screen, pushing enter just makes it beep.. if you restart it then it loads the splash scrren again then goes to the safe mode select screen it asks you if you wanna start in safe mode, normal mode, safe with networking, safe with prompt, or last config. that worked.... now if i choose safe mode it will start up and bring me to the login screen...(here's the weird part ) once i got it to start up in safe mode and i actually navagited windows to check setting's and then restarted...but i haven't been able to get safe mode to run again.....when all these problems started i was running winamp and it locked up so i had to reboot...anyone have any sugestions? is there any Diagnostic Utilities i can use to check the problem? oh yea when i goto the bios screen it verify's there is a hard drive in place and it is configured for it....
please help!!

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Dani AI

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— the pattern you describe (constant HDD light, intermittent ability to boot to Safe Mode, then later the BIOS sometimes saying it cannot find the drive) most often points to a hardware problem rather than only a Windows startup issue. Backing up data is the immediate priority.

Power down, remove AC and battery, and carefully pull the drive to inspect and reseat it. On older Latitudes a loose ribbon/connector or corroded pins will cause intermittent detection. While the drive is out, try connecting it to another machine with a 2.5" IDE-to-USB adapter or install it in a USB enclosure so you can copy critical files off before running repairs. If the drive is clicking, unusually hot, or not consistently seen by another PC, treat it as failing and stop using it to avoid further data loss.

Run Dell's pre-boot diagnostics from the boot menu (press the boot-menu key at the Dell splash). Let any full-disk/SMART tests complete and note error codes. If diagnostics report read/write or SMART failures, replace the drive and restore from backup or image. If the drive checks out, the intermittent Safe Mode success implies a software/driver/boot record issue. When you can get into Safe Mode, do a clean boot (disable non-Microsoft startup items and drivers) and remove any recently added software or codecs (Winamp plugins were active when the problem started).

If comfortable with imaging, create a sector-level clone before attempting repairs (Clonezilla, ddrescue, or commercial imaging tools are appropriate). If diagnostics are inconclusive and data recovery is critical, consider a professional recovery service. In addition to 's software-repair options, start with the hardware checks and immediate data backup described above.

Member Avatar for DMR

If you have the original installation CD, try a . You can also troubleshoot using the Recovery Console; although it's a more "manual" approach.

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