I am trying to find out what is wrong with a friends laptop. I really think the harddrive is shot cause I get the error code 146 but I want to make sure before I tell her. I made a dos boot disk with chkdsk on it but did not put the scandisk on it. Now every time I make a new disk with just the boot files, chkdsk and scandisk I keep getting the original disk information. What gives? It boots ok but I cant get to scandisk. Is there a key to this "problem"? My laptop expertise is way below the mark so help me if you can.

Is this in any way related to your other post? http://computing.net/hardware/wwwbo... i_Xp/VistaUser

remove the harddrive from the side panel or back of the laptop and see what manufacturer it is that made it. Then go to that manufacturer's website and download the utillity for that drive (floppy or bootable cd) it will have all the tools on it to check the drive and will be the most accurate. In The Matters Of Style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, Stand Like A Rock "People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid."

Yes it is. I read on the internet to run chkdsk and scandisk but as you can see above I am having a time getting it to run.

Scandisk won't work if it's a NTFS partition. I'm not for certain Dos chkdsk is the same as the one Xp uses due to it's drive size limitation. If you have a Windows XP Cd, run it from there. From your other post, see if the Bios is detecting the drive.

No the hard drive is not recognized in the bios. She says she did not get a os cd with her new Dell computer. Does this laptop store the os on a portion of the harddrive?

If the Hard drive is not recognized, then that's a problem. Before you go changing anything, have your friend contact Dell support. The machine should still be under warranty. If you start messing around with stuff, you'll void that and be screwed. Life's more painless for the brainless.