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@pijai wrote:

beeps  twice / all  four  lights  in  back  shine  continuously.
the  computer  won't  boot  up.
my  system  is  dimension8200  and  it  uses  an  eide  wes-dig  120gb  drive  as  primary  device.

the  problem  started  when  shutting  down  computer  the  other  day.
while  "windows  is  shutting  down"  displayed  on  screen,  power  in  my  house  went  out.
tried  booting  computer  up  again,  and  got  message  "Dell's disk monitoring system has detected that drive 0  on the primary EIDE controller is operarting outside of normal specifications . . . "
the  next  message  that  appears  is  that  the  file  windows\system32\config\system  is  missing  or  corrupt.

i  am  able  to  get  to  the  f12  screen / setup  utility.
i  did  ctrl/alt/d  as  osprey  suggested  for  another   client,  and  the  test  result  from  that  concluded  i  have  "error code 4".

1.) the  twin   beeps . . . does  this  mean   there  is  problem  with   boot ?
2.) the  four  lights  on  at  back   of  computer,  abc=green,  d=amber .  . .  what  does  this  signify ?
3.) am  i  out  of  options  in  using  the  present  drive  as  boot  drive ?

thanks  in  advance.
pj

 

Hard drive has failed as the message you got has indicated.  Time to buy a new one.

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@pijai wrote:

thanks  for  the  interest  so  far.

since  my  last  posting,  i  have  tried  "repair  installation"  using  the  oem  win-xp  cd  that  came   with  the  computer,  seems  win -xp  couldn't  repair  the  damage.

afterward,  and  even  at  this  time,  i  have  booted  to  dell's  diagnostic  cd.  by  the  looks  of  the  results,   seems  less  than  one  percent  of  the  old  120gb  driive  sustained  damaged.   this  means  99%  is  still  usable / accessible . . . and  probably  the  majority  of  my   personal  files  remain  intact.

 

as  illustrated  earlier,  this  120gb  drive  had  been  my  primary  drive.

now,  if  i  was  to  buy  a  new  10gb  eide  drive  as  primary  system  drive,  and  use  the  120gb  drive  as  "slave"  drive (not reformatting drive),  would  the  remnants  of  the  win -xp  operatiing   system  on  the  old  120gb  drive  interfere / corrupt  with  the  new  10gb  boot  drive.

 

First, you can't possibly mean buying a 10gb drive.  You'll have to search for a 40gb, the reality is that you can buy a 200gb for $30 this weekend...

 

Second, you may or may not be able to recover data from the old drive.  STOP PLAYING WITH IT NOW.  Get the new drive, load XP, drivers, etc.  THEN plug in the old drive, and quickly pull off the data starting with the most important.

 

The more you play, the sooner it dies.