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Broken Hard Drive?

1K views 2 replies 2 participants last post by  christopher2405 
#1 ·
I was having problems booting into Windows today, to the extent that I couldn't even boot into the Windows Recovery Environment. I decided to boot into an Ubuntu Live CD that I had, with the view to transferring all of my files to an external hard drive and then reinstalling Windows.

I got into the Ubuntu environment fine, but it wouldn't mount my Windows drives (there's a Dell Recovery partition, a Windows Recovery partition and the OS partition), giving me the error:
Code:
Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 13: ntfs_attr_pread_i: ntfs_pread failed: Input/output error
Failed to read NTFS $Bitmap: Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for more details.
whenever I tried. I tried this a few times, including after reboots.

Since there seemed to be some sort of hardware problem, I ran the Dell Pre-Boot Diagnostics test (which I assume is built into the BIOS ROM chip, as this ran fine). All of the tests passed, except for one which gave the error:
Code:
Error code 0142
Msg: Error code 2000-0142
Msg: Hard Drive 0 - self test unsuccessful. Status: 79.
The given error code and message can be used by technical support to help diagnose the problem.
I then rang Dell, who told me that error code means the hard drive needs to be replaced. For a like-for-like replacement, with an engineer coming out the next working day to replace the hard drive and reinstall the OS and driver, it will cost £173.59.

My question is, are Dell being completely honest with me, or is the hard drive salvageable? The cost isn't really a problem to me, as the laptop is insured, and there isn't any irreplaceable data on there.

Thanks.
 
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