Bloody Dell - My HD diedFollow

So I got home from work friday evening and I went to log onto play WoW. I was all chomping at the bit because this was the long awaited Lunatics vs Pancake Bunnies Battlegrounds night. So I goto turn on the computer and the girlfriend lets me know that she had turned it on earlier and it wasnt working. So she just turned it off. Curious I made sure everything was connected and turned it on. After an initial boot screen I was sent to the most horrible screen ever.

The Blue Screen Of Death.


I stay calm but after a 30 minutes of looking around I decide to concede defeat and call Dell technical support. We chat for a bit and I tell them my problem. As soon as they realize I have a hardware problem they go on an extra long rant making sure I know that my Warranty ended in December of 2005. I assure them I understand and I just want to see what I can do and possibly locate the specific problem. After another 20 minutes we figure out that my Maxtor 160gb HD is dead, kaput, gone forever as well as everything on it. They once again mention that the warranty is over and I acknowledge that I dont care. I thank them for there time then they mention I might get a customer service rep survey in e-mail. They let me know which mark is the highest. Fun stuff.


So the next day I call up a couple computer stores and find a replacement 160gb HD for 96$ canadian which isnt too bad. So I go over pick it up and head home and install it and then reinstall windows xp. No problem, nothing too hard. However once i have XP installed and am ready to go onto internet to install drivers I find I cant access the internet. So after some searching I notice the ethernet/network card doesnt have the drivers installed so I look through the disks that I have from Dell. They dont have drivers for it. So I call up dell (they once again remind me that warranty is up) and ask them and they are worse than useless. No help at all so I ask them to tell me exactly what the make and model of the NIC card is so I can download the drivers at a friends. However the girl has a thick indian accent and just blazes through it so I cant get it down. Finally after 5 attempts I stop. I thank her for her time and she tells me about the survey I might recieve and the high score.


This morning I went to a friends place downloaded the drivers I thought would be applicable. Drove home, they worked and I am currently in the process of repatching and reinstalling all my programs.


I have to say Dell sucks monkey balls. I managed to get it all done all on my lonesome. All they cared about was stating that my warranty was out. When I asked for actual technical support or questions about my rig they were **** poor (except the first person who helped me recognize it was the HD that was fried).

Bloody dell and bloody having to reinstall everything from scratch. I am also bloody heart broken I lost all my music

Just because it won't boot doesn't mean the data is all gone, unless the drive itself was physically damaged. However, data recovery is not cheap, and it's probably more cost efficient to just start from scratch.

That sucks.

Could try adding the old one as a seondary, just to see if he can browse to stuff.

First thing is to see if you can get the BIOS to even recognize it.
HOwever, there is this nifty little USB external IDE thingy that I have that is awesome for such things.

maybe also try using GHOST as I've found that it somtimes will correct errors that keep certain data from being read from the cloning process.

Kel I am entranced by your avatar. Bodhi that sucks, you could always buy a Gateway

This problem happened on my PC about 4 months ago. I took it to a PC repair shop, they said it was the old HD that facked up. Worried, about losing EVERYTHING i asked them what could i do. Went out bought a new HD, took it back to them and they slaved the old HD so now i just go into My Documents, go to my old HD file, and boom...
150$ later from the PC repair and it was totally worth it.

Try the freezer trick!

Same thing happened to mine Bhod, but thankfully mine was still in warranty. Most likely it was a heat issue. Dell cases suck for cooling, and my HD was consistently running 51 C. I bought a HD cooling fan and the temp dropped to around 29 C. You might wanna look into pickin one up.

Edited, Sun Mar 26 16:33:35 2006 by Kastigir

How's that one work?

Linky

I am always afraid my HD will die, so I back everything up about every 6 months or so. And it's about time.

My computer is sick now too, but it's my CPU. Hopefully we'll be getting me a totally new one in a few months.

When a hard drive starts acting up on me like that - not booting, especially, it gets relegated to secondary drive status and a new (or cleanly-formatted) HDD takes the primary slot.

I don['t know what y'alls are doing to your Dells - mine is fine. Maybe it's just the desktops that are fucked up.

Slaving a HDd is not hard.

You need both HDDs in front of you when you get ready to start. Look for the pin diagram on each; then set the new drive to be Master and the old one to be Slave. Plug them both up, boot up the PC, go into the bios, make sure your mob is recognizing both drives, and then let it boot on up.

XP will assign the drive a letter and all that stuff. If you can see that drive in XP, you can probably get files off it and move them to your new drive. I've pulled the old slave/master trick several times due to being a lazy bastich who knows a drive is crapping out and does nothing about it until the ole BSOD comes along.

If you can see the drive, but not pull data from it succesfully due to read errors and such, doing things such as defrag and scandisk actually can help the situation. And, of course there are some other tools out there that do more and better. I've just never had to resort to them.

Funny thing with Dell...it's so odd how, like, 1/2 their customer base says "I'm happy with my Dell" and then the other half simply wishes horrible death upon every & all CSR's they have to deal with, along with the death of whoever built the PC. At least you got a Blue Screen of Death...my Dell doesn't even give me that. It's only 2 years old, and has been gutted & had most/all components replaced 4 times, along with two Video Card replacements through the Mail. While I'm inclined to say "Thank God for the Warranty", I'm also inclined to say I'm ready to reach through the phone every time I call and strangle the idiot on the other end. My PC now consistantly boots up to a Black Screen with only the Model & Product number for my Video Card. Dell insists that it's a Memory Problem, and claim components come loose from the Motherboard quite "Commonly" (as they put it) in their PC's. Fantastic...

I've had about 40 calls, -never- with someone that really knows their PC's. I have 8 names written down, all surprisingly "American" names for people who are absolutely 100% not American. I've tried reasoning with coincidence, but in all honestly...Dell lies through their teeth to their Customers. I mean, how many "Harold Woody" and "Charles Smith's" can I talk to that are 100% foreign to not only the American language, but the very computers they sell & distribute as well? When I finally do get a new 2nd PC to replace my Dell, I have every intention of taking it outside & smashing it with a Sledgehammer...and then shipping it back to Dell.