A friend of mine has a DELL Inspiron 2200, which they dropped and no longer functions.
When the comptuer starts up, I get a black/gray screen with the following text.
I am recieving this error message before the BIOS is loaded up: "The Device in the system modular bay cannot be identified. It may not be completely inserted or may have some other problem. Please read and complete the following steps.
1. Press the device completely and firmly into the bay.
2. Press the ESC-key -- wait for the system to power down.
3. Press the power button to retry detecting the device."
Dell has some diagnostic tools built in, and I ran some. The hard drive failed on the "Read Test", but passed on the others.
I got to the screen where it allows you to select boot options, and I tried to boot from the CD (I had an exe for a DOS based hard drive utility I wanted to run), and it spit out a whole bunch of errors. mdisk(0)utility(1) <- something like that, and it wouldnt boot to a command prompt. At one point it booted into Windows (Black screen with a windows logo - blue bar (Win XP Pro)), and it came to a blue screen of death.
Is it the hard drive? I dont know how to reset the dvd/cd drive, not sure if thats an issue?
Suggestions?
Thanks