A friend of mine has a dell inspiron 4150 laptop that may well have an error with the hard disk.

Someone else has already attempted to fix it, so the repair / diagnotic partition doesn't exist.

 

It has a IBM (Hitach) hard drive, and we went to http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm and got the CD image that makes a CD to test the hard drive. Didn't take the floppy route as the person doesn't have a floppy drive.

 

Made a  CD with the ISO from that site with NERO, and changed to boot sequence in the BIOS, but it fails to boot from the CD.

Now this just could be a bad disc that she burnt, but the DELL manual states.....

 

 HINT: You can only boot (start up) your computer from a CD, CD-RW, or DVD drive installed as a fixed optical drive. You cannot boot from one of these modules installed in the module bay.

 

 

The way I read that is, if the CD drive is a module, it's not bootable, but looking through the DELL manual it tells you how to reinstall windows with using the CD, so it must be bootable!!

 

Am I missing something here, or is the module bay something different?