Error: "hard drive 0 could not be found" - hard drive failing?

I own a Dell latitude laptop which purchased used last summer. Two days ago it started giving me a severe problem where it wouldn't boot. The progress bar on the bios would pause before filling in at the end and then I'd get a black screen saying hard drive 0 could not be found.

Today it's been booting and running ok. The laptop's got one hard drive in it which is set up in two partitions and I've run scandisk on both... the first partition had two errored sectors which XP corrected, second partition scan running now.

Does this sound like a hard drive which is dying? Or a glitch that might be gone for good?

Here's hopin'.


Marty

 

No backup needed. I bought the laptop used and only really need it when on vacation. However I keep it in my garage and use it a little each day pretty steadily.

Thing is it happened again just before, then after a few minutes did boot. I had it running and got a blue screen saying there was a hardware/device error. I can tell if it's not going to boot up again because won't hear the HD start up.

So is the next step reseating the HD cable? I've done lots of work on my desktops but never opened a laptop. And the unit came w/o any docs, so where can I find instructions for opening this puppy up?

 

Well I ran Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test and the result was

failure code 0x73 defective device, excessive shock

Spoke to the vendor Retrobox and although the unit's past warrantee they are going to take back the old drive and send me a replacement. I know that I never dropped this so it must've been old damage, I imagine. Although it gave me no trouble for a number of months.