Re: Hard Drive 0 Not Found PLEASE HELP!!!

On Sat, 04 Feb 2006 21:59:57 -0500, Bill Todd <billtodd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Samantha27 wrote:
I have a Dell Inspiron 600m notebook and it was fine until recently when
i was playing a DVD and a blue error screen showed up, so i shut the
computer down and when i went to start it again, i got a message that
said "The system primary HDD is protected by a password authentication
system, you cannot access data on this hard drive without the correct
password. please type in the hard drive password and press enter" i had
never set a password for the computer, so somehow i went into setup and
set a password for it and i guess it worked BUT after i typed the
password in, i started getting a black error screen that reads "Primary
hard disk drive 0 not found. Cardbus NIC boot failed." I tried to have
dell help me, but their customer service is the absolute worst and they
wouldnt do anything for me. Does anyone have ANY suggestions or know how
to fix this problem?

I know nothing whatsoever about the problem you're having. That said, I
have the following suggestions (though hope that someone with a better
understanding will come up with better ones):

If you're very lucky, you'll find that letting the machine sit for a
while (in a cool but not cold place) might bring it back to life. If it
does, your first priority should be to back up the most important data
off the drive in case it should die more finally next time (and keep
frequent backups if you manage to continue using it: whatever happened
can, and may be likely to, happen again).

If that fails, my first guess would be that something physical (i.e.,
not some kind of virus) happened to your hard drive. It may be dead, or
just the victim of a bad connection of some kind (or possibly a hardware
problem on the motherboard). The latter two would be easy to diagnose:
just pull it out and try reading it on another machine (the easiest
way might be via a 2.5" USB enclosure attached to another laptop or to a
desktop). I've never taken a laptop apart but it shouldn't be too
intimidating, since the drives and memory are usually designed to be
field-replaced.

If the other machine recognizes the drive as accessible but can't access
the file system on it, then perhaps the problem *is* something like a
virus (or just malfunctioning hardware or software on your machine) that
somehow garbled it: software products exist that can try to recover at
least some of the data from such drives, but I don't happen to be
familiar with specific ones. If the drive still appears completely dead
on the other machine, then it may be a lost cause: since it died while
operating, it isn't likely to be the victim of something like 'stiction'
that might be recoverable - though professional (and expensive) recovery
services exist that can usually recover data from any drive that has not
been completely physically destroyed.

Good luck,

- bill

The password is stored in the reserved area of the disk. Since the
disk could no longer access it, then gut feeling is that you had a
catastrophic failure in that area of the disk and the HDD was not able
to remap reserved blocks to replace it. Since the BIOS didn't see a
disk then you have even more problems that not being able to access
reserved area.

I doubt a virus was to fault, if a virus did send the command to
enable the disk's security and set a password, what do you think the
odds are that you guessed it? About a gazillion to one, so the disk
clearly has a problem reading and writing to to the reserved area.

So, try doing a cold boot, literally, after the HDD has been in the
fridge for a while, but odds of that working are very small. Very
small.

You have most likely lost the disk, and if you want the data back, get
out your checkbook and contact a data recovery firm. It will likely
cost you more than the price of your laptop.

Heed Bill's advice and test the HDD in another laptop as well, but the
symptoms are classic indicators of a dead HDD.

.

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