I’m working on a Dell Latitude C610 Laptop. It’s a second- hand machine that came with Win XP Professional SP1. It has been working fine for several months until the other day. During the boot, the computer is unable to locate the Hard Drive (Device 0). I put together a Win XP boot CD (BartsPE) that includes a GUI interface and some disk utilities. When attempting to run the Check Disk, it reports it cannot run because the drive C is RAW format. This is curious problem of which I’d like to know my options to resolve. I should add the drive does click and spin repetitively at startup. I realize it’s easy to respond saying “the drive is hosed”, but I’m not sold on that just yet. Also, I should highlight each utility I’ve used does not recognize the physical drive. Which I guess goes back to my previous statement about the Drive being hosed. My hope is that the noise I’m hearing is the drive attempting to be read? in which case the computer does recognize it? Is there a utility I can include on the startup CD that will read RAW format? Thanks, Jeff

I am not an expert but this may help some. Did you by chance alter the MBR. Many older BIOS cannot read a boot partition (MBR) beyond the first 1024 cylinders (first 528 MB) on a HD regardless of the file system type. If some part of the boot partition (MBR) was moved beoynd the first 1024 cylinders then the HD cannot be accessed. I am not sure but because you ran several ultilities on the HD that might have happened, but there might be a utility that could undo that??? hth whoami

Hello, Here’s the final result of my problem. I had to replace the drive. It was getting very Hot, and the BIOS was no longer recognizing it. Also, It does not work in another laptop. Putting it in the refrigerator / freezer did not help any either. Thank you all for the great responses and tips. At least I feel like I tried everything. A new drive is installed, and my previous data loss was not that great! I was fortunate. Best, Jeff