My wife's Dell is pretty old now at 6+ years.Yesterday upon power up I get a black screen with white text stating something like "sorry for the inconvenience but Windows did not load successfully, it may be due to a recent hardware change" and so onSo what might be the problem? I checked all the connections - everything was secure and appeared as normal. I wasn't even able to run safe mode with cmd prompt (in attempt to run CHK DSK). The power supply fan was spinning as wellI can get into BIOS, and I can change boot order. I put in a Windows XP install CD and it loaded up the setup files ok, but I don't want to format anything yet. There's data on the HDD that could be important. I don't have an extra HDD to test with...Any ideas?

As an update I attempted to run the repair option (from windows CD). It didn't do what I thought but it did get me a temporary command prompt - which is what I needed. I ran CHKDSK and the scan found errors on the hard drive. Which was my initial conclusion as to why it wasn't loading XP.Let's say I want to read the drive from my system. It's not a SATA drive I think its EIDE or whatever those old ones are. How would I go about doing that.Or, is there something else I should do to remedy the problem?EDIT:I *think* I have it solved.What I did was insert the original Win XP CD and choose the "repair" option. I then ran CHKDSK, which gave some errors. I then booted into safe mode finally (successfully) and the Windows desktop and all files appeared to be intact. Then I powered off, rebooted without the CD in the drive, and loaded Windows as normal. Things appear to be back..... hehe time will tell.This PC is definitly on its last leg. I can't believe it's lasted 6 years lol

Back up your data before using the PC further. Then download Hiren's boot CD (google it), burn the iso to CD, boot from it, and run MHDD (menu options 6, 8, 8, 4, auto). Select the hard drive from the list of drives in the system (type the number and hit enter), then hit f4 twice. If you get any sectors that are 500ms or worse, or if you get any unc/amnf/idnf/? errors you have a bad drive and it's time to replace it.

Ok thank you.It's a pre-fab Dell and I checked - access to the HDD will be a pain, they got it in there in an odd fashion.

Maybe you can help me. I was able to run the MHDD program however ran into a problem once I got in there. Upon selecting number 1 (the first hard drive on the list and for some odd reason not shown this time but it was when did it) it gave me this blue screen...

It's not seeing your hard drive. If it is a SATA drive you'll need to go into the BIOS and change the operation of SATA drives to IDE or Compatibility, whichever of the two options your BIOS allows you to select. Then you can run MHDD.If it's not a SATA drive but instead ATA (commonly (mistakenly) referred to as IDE) then you need to configure it is a master drive and not a slave.If you still can't get MHDD to run, the drive is almost certainly bad.