Just out of curiosity, what model Dell is it?
Laptop, Inspiron E1505.
No USB plugins, no CDs or DVDs in the drive.
I took the computer to university IT today. They confirmed the diagnosis of hard drive failure, determined that the memory is working just fine, etc. Just one wrinkle: when you put the hard drive into another computer,
it works just fine. (Ie, they hooked it up to a desktop with a cable, opened Windows Explorer, and were able to browse through the stuff on my disk.) They told me that they were pretty confident it's not a failure of the connector or controller, most saliently because the error message does not match that scenario and the diagnostic couldn't find the drive independently.
Looks like I'm buying a new HD at this point, but my father wonders: would the computer fail to see a new HD, too?
