Is my Hard Drive dead beyond all hope?

Januaria

Januaria

Hi All ~

I have a Dell XPS 630i (purchased in 2008), that I use weekly to run QB 2006. Other than that it's pretty idle.

Starting last week after powering up, the Dell splash screen either doesn't show at all or freezes. I'm trying to get into the BIOS to run the available troubleshooting utilities.

I've opened the chassis, unseated the HD, dusted it off, unplugged and re-plugged the data and power cables. Nada. There are no system beeps. The keyboard is unresponsive, but the optical drive trays will eject when the release buttons are pressed (and they will retract). I did notice that there's a small white light on the mobo that's lit, if that's any indicator.

Are there any work arounds to: (1) getting into the BIOS, and (2) reviving the HD?

Thanks!
 
Hi Elizabeth ~

TY for your super prompt response!

Will that work if the HD in question runs XP Pro and all my other available desktops run W10?
 
I think she means take it out and put in another PC not run it alongside win10. which obviously won't work. But that wouldn't be my suggestion unless you have the same generation and chipset PC. otherwise it will just blue screen, it also sounds to me like there is nothing wrong with the hard drive but a problem with the dell. if you want the quickest diag, since its 12 year old system look closely at the motherboard caps in good light and see if they have a slight bulge on the tops, a lockup boot up screen is usually caps on the motherboard or caps on the power supply or a faulty ram module, but with dell and this generation and age it is usually the capacitors near the ram slots or cpu. and then reboot without the HDD connected and see how far it gets to determine if the motherboard is faulty. there would be no reason to do anything with the disk yet or assume its fautly if you can't pass the dell screen.
 
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Januaria said:
Hi

I assume you have a conventional "spinning" hard drive, not an SSD or later.

There is an app called "Spinrite" that has "fixed" spinner drives for me several times over the last 3-4 decades. Yes, I originally used it on 20MB Seagates and more recently on 2 TB HPs.<G>

You might look into that...but it will require a different computer to run on while your questionable drive is connected via USB or such. And that computer might need a floppy or CD...the instructions will tell you how to proceed.

It "tests" each spot on the drive, recording and reading something and if that spot responds properly, it marks that spot as good and moves on to the next. If it does not respond properly it tries to, I guess, repair whatever the issues was, then retests. It takes awhile, several hours. and if it reports success, then your drive is fixed. The data on it is undisturbed so it should boot. If it can't fix it, well...you're no worse off than you are now. Eh?<G>

Use search on Spinrite to get to Steve's site.
Click to expand...
 
Hi All ~

Sorry for the tardiness of my response to your replies. Really appreciate your input. But I decided that my old Dell XPS 630i (2008) was beyond my meager tech abilities, so I removed the HD and recycled the tower. Fortunately I also had a Dell Inspiron Laptop that also ran XP Pro, so I'm using that to run my ancient QB 2006 Pro (where I've recorded all my financial transactions). Turns out that QB 2006 is not portable to versions of QB that can run on WIndows 10.

Again, TY all!
 
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