Dell inspiron 6400 deletes OS by itself

mishy

I have a dell inspiron laptop that deletes everthing on the Hard disk every 7-9 days by itself. I had windows basic on it for a year and then decided to put Linux fedora 9 after a few days that it came up with a message grub. I spent days trying to sort it out and searched every forum possible but that did not sort out anything so in the end I re-installed because it was faster than trying to repair. So I reinstalled my fedora9 again and after a few days it came up with the <grub message and I tried to go all the websites I could go to and went tried a supergrub cd but it would not recognize any data on the hard drive. In the end I decide to go back to vista so I installed Vista Ultimate. After a few days it came up with the <grub message so I tried to load into Xp using a SuperGrub cd but still it could not find any OS on the hard drive. After this incident I formatted the hard disk and re-installed Vista Ultimate because I thought I had not completely formated the hard drive after fedora but now again after a few days the Laptop came up with the Dell Media screen and the next message was insert correct media and after that it will not recognise any OS on the hard drive. On all occasions I have tried using the Vista Dvd to restore or repair the System but that has failed.



What could be the problem before I try to re-install the OS for the 6th time in less a month?
The laptop is out of warranty and its a dell inspiron 6400

drainey

Possible hardware issues are a bad hard drive, or a bad system (mother) board. Good also be an issue with bad/incorrect drivers causing the system not to read the HD properly. Does the HD show up in the bios when it won't recognize the os? If it is recognized, I'd say get a copy of Darik's Boot and Nuke and run it to competely wipe the HD, then try to load the os again.

Good Luck.

nel

Sounds strange. Have you tried to recover the mbr incase it is that which is corrupting (probably doubtfull if its happened so many times). Could be the hd is dodgy. Have you ran any diagnostic on the disk? or infact installed and used another hdd? Doesnt sound like a mobo issue to me.

To rule out a windows driver issue just use a linux live cd and see if you can see the data.

laptop hd's arent expensive anymore if you do need to replace them.

mishy

I tried to repair the MBR the first time it happened but that did not work. I loaded a live linux cd and that did not recognize anything so eventually. I installed vista, when I came up with same problem I tried the Vista dvd recovery but that did not find any OS at all and every other Live cd I have tried cannot find anything.

I have not installed any new hardware or hard drive. I have run dell hard drive test and the drive is tested Ok with no problems.

dynamik

I'd go with a hardware issue over a driver issue since it's doing it with both Fedora and Vista. I think best case is you have a bad drive with the worse case being a bad controller on the motherboard. I'm not that familiar with boot sector viruses. Would it be possible for one of those to corrupt data after some period of time? I don't think that's too likely, but you may want to wipe that as well just to be safe. I'm putting my money on hardware failure though.

nel

Ah, well if possible, i would try another HDD in your laptop i you can get hold of one. then if it works you know its the current hd. if its the same then its something else on your laptop.

Sounds like the hdd though because if it was ok then a live cd would be able to see the drive and its contents etc.

mishy

I might just try re-installing for the last time and see what happens but in the mean time I will look for another hdd. Its strange that the hard drive can be detected during the installation but it looses data after a few days.