I have a dell inspiron N4030 laptop 320HDD, 2.31ghz. Dish read error occured

[osman wyne]

Hello,
my laptop fell down and since then when restarted, it brings me a message that a disk read error occured, press CTRL ALT DEL to continue which again takes you back to the same message. I tried chkdsk C: /R and a message that my first boot sector is unreadable or corrupt with alot of correcting attempts in the second sector at $130 on various files and failed to work. After running the diagnostic test it gave me error code 2000-0146. So what is the problem

 

[Dr_JRE]

Sounds to me like it is broken.. well let's see what we can salvage out of this thing, with any luck, its not broken.

Lets start here. when you turn on the computer listen to the hard drive power on. see if you can feel it working.

A healthy hard drive on boot should spin up, make slight clicking or grinding noises as it reads the platters then a more distinct click or thump of the arm resetting to its rest position. you should not be hearing or feeling loud clunking noises.

If it doesnt seem to have a click of death, your data may be recoverable. I would suggest booting the laptop from a Live Linux USB disk with persistence. Windows may not boot but the file may still be accessable. even if they aren't you can install recovery software onto the live linux USB and recover the data to another disk, a networked computer, or burn it to DVD.
To do this download Kubuntu and Linux Live USB creator.
create a bootable USB disk using the kubuntu ISO you downloaded. be sure you click format drive in fat32 to enable the persistence slider if it's not there.
next, insert the USB Live disk, start the computer and go into your laptop's BIOS settings and change the boot device priority so that the hard drive boots last. save the settings and restart. the computer should now boot into linux. select "Try Kubuntu"
Once loaded open Dolphin File Manager from where the Start menu should be.

Are you able to access your files? If not, Let's now verify wether or not the drive works.

Go to the Kickoff (The Start menu) and open Muon package manager. Install Firefox web browser and apt-url.

Now, open Firefox and go to: http://gsmartcontrol.berlios.de/home/index.php/en/Downloads
Click on the link for Ubuntu and install gsmartcontrol. this will perform a diagnostic of the drive and tell you if its good, or whats bad about it.

Assumeing it passed:
try Magic Rescue. Go back to the Kickoff (the start menu) and open Muon Software Center and install Magic Rescue
Or you can open a Terminal window and type: sudo apt-get install magicrescue


Perhaps you don't want to recover the data? you could just try sticking your windows disk in the drive, boot from cd, delete all the partitions, create new partitions, reformat and try re-installing.

For help with BIOS Setup and boot device priority, see you PC manufacturer's website. (Or if its a Home-Brew PC, check the motherboard manufacturer's website.