I recently had a start up problem with my Dell XPS 410 which I purchased in March 2007 and has a 250 GB Samsung SP2504C hard drive. I have partitioned the drive so my data is on one partion and the software on the primary partition. Fact is I started my machine one day and no program including the PC Cillin antivirus will work. I decided to restart it and then it failed to start.
I went to the advanced boot options by pressing F8 at start up time and choose "last known good configuration" this too did not work so I decided to repair with the installation CD, this too failed and so I decided to reinstall the operating system. This too failed so next time I went to the prompt from the inside the set up process and issued the fomat c: command. This worked all the way till it asked me to key in a label for the drive. After I did that, it reported "Format failed" I repeated this several times but to no avail.
In the bios, I realised that the systems recognises the SAMSUNG hard drive but reports that there is no SATA hard drive present.
I run windows Vista.
I am wondering what to do to be able to bring the system back. I have not backed my data up lately and will do all I can to save that portion of the hard drive.
Any help? Suggestions?