jackdelamare

Hi,

I have a really old Dell laptop, an Inspiron 510m and I remember a few years it broke. I never got around to fixing it, but now being a big fan of Linux I thought I'd do it up and run some distro on it. Or maybe just XP again, not sure.

Anyhow, when I boot it, it says "No boot device available" and then something about striking the F1 key to retry or the F2 key to enter setup. I always thought the hard drive had just blown, but after reading some things online it sounds as if the original XP install may have just corrupted or something.

So does anybody know what I could do? Before buying a new hard drive (which has been hard to track down) I thought I could do something in the bios maybe.

I've just booted into the Ubuntu LiveCD and that's working ok.

Thanks,
Jack

BCCOMP

Hi Jack,

Can you enter the BIOS to see if the BIOS detects the Harddrive.
If it does I would find out the manufacture of the HD and run their Diagnostic Utility.
This will determine if the drive is OK.

If you have the Dell Diagnostic utility it may also work.

It is very possible the drive is good, as you stated you think XP OS maybe corrupted. Like that never happens

Hope this helps,
Bill

jackdelamare

The drive is listed in the bios, and it gives me the option to boot from it. It's an Hitachi Travelstar so I'll take a look for the Diagnostic Utility and give it a go, then let you know how it goes.

Thanks a lot. :)

BCCOMP

Let me know how you make out.
Bill

jackdelamare

The diagnostic utility does not find the drive, so I'm not sure what to do. The bios finds it, and I "can" boot from it, but it's not in this.

BCCOMP

The HD utilities do not work with all travelstars

Try to format the drive and see if it will format
Or use Dban, Active kill disk to format the drive.
If it formats you may have a good shot.

What OS are you planing to install?
Bill

jackdelamare

Well, I was hoping to get back into my old XP as I love looking back on how I used to work, but that's probably out of the window, so I'm thinking some kind of Linux.

BCCOMP

What is the size of the drive?
Have you attempted to install XP on the drive (Clean install)?
Bill

jackdelamare

It's a 40GB drive (yes it's a terribly old laptop). I tried booting into the Ubuntu LiveCD but it appeared to freeze. I guess this would be because of the spec (Celeron 1.3GHz).

venkatramanat

u need to inistall hdd driver before inistalling linux nd also update BIOS. nd change the drive mode in bios setup. if any further clarification about dell products just ping me

BCCOMP

I do not know what you mean by this, as I am sure this is an IDE drive and not a Sata drive. IDE drives do not need extra drivers to install an OS.

@jackdelamare,
If you have the XP disc, see if it will do a clean install.
Set the BIOS to boot from CD-Rom first and see if windows XP will install without errors.
Bill

jackdelamare

Well I tried looking for a Dell XP disk, a restore one that should've come with it but I didn't, so I'm going to try this other XP disk I have. If it works, i'll be sad not to see what it looked like back then but oh well.

EDIT:
"Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer"

So yeah, I need a new hard drive?

BCCOMP

Hi,
It sounds like it.
You have a ATA100 (ATA 6) Harddrive
Here is a list of various HDD that should work:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...ame=5400%20RPM

I would avoid the larger drives as I am not sure the motherboard will support them (160GB, 250GB)

Hope this helps.
Bill

jackdelamare

Ah ok, thanks. At first I was looking for the exact model number, but will these drives work?

BCCOMP

YES, They will work