hdd magic act

I am new to this website and forums all together

I have a dell inspiron 1525 with the stock 250gb HDD. We started having issues with it saying that the HDD was not found or that there was not one installed. This was a random event thing as somedays it would work and other days it wouldnt. After some time it stopped working completely. In BIOS it is shown. I put SLAX OS on a thumb drive and booted the laptop from it and I am able too access the HDD as well as open pictures and such. I have treid booting the HDD on several other computers using a SATA wire without success. It has vista on it, It goes to the small loading bar with the little green lines and then after a minute or so it goes back to the Dell screen. I have tried to reseat the drive, tried booting from other computers, and cleaning the prongs. The bios order is correct in that it has the HDD at the top of the list. I an at my wits end.

Any and all help would be amazing

if you can access it and not boot from it well something is corrupt, i say it is about to die soon. I would backup your stuff to a new one and work off a new HD.

If you have your install DVD you could try a startup repair.

You boot to the DVD and go through the motions of re-installing but on one of the screens in the lower left corner it will say repair your computer.

That is actually what I was doing but it quit working for me, but i will try it agian

I cannot access if from anything but my flash drive. Does anyone know of a good free Os to put on the flash drive? Slax works but its terrible trying to setup wifi

disc isnt working, it says "windows is loading files" then it does back to the black screen with the loading green loading bar then blank black screen...

I'd definitely backup that data if possible and start shopping for a new drive.

I'm sure just about any flavor of linux can be setup to boot from a USB.

i have slax now, i am going to try a few others... i ddont mind having too boot from a flash drive as i can still access my files on the hard drive as well as save too it, i just cant boot from it

You can use live CD's to access your files, and custom build them too. i would recommend getting HDD sentinel Pro to evaluate your HDD, it reads the SMART (Self Monitoring and Analysys Reporting Technology) Data stored on the HDD. or utilize the BIOS to conduct a HDD Read Write test on the heads. hopefully its just a few bad sectors and not whole tracks!

not just Linux. i have created windows live cd's as well, Most end users prefer the windows interface.