Wife has a dell 600m laptop, VERY well taken care of, spends most of its time on the port replicator, rarely used mobile - basically its treated very well no drops, bumps, looks brand new, most typing done on external keyboard vs actual laptop etc etc just very little actual hands on use of the laptop itself so its in great physical shape.
Anyways shes working on some important work files and a spread sheet, we are about to go to bed, she goes to shut down before bed and gets some blue screen of death that she said had a sentence about restart your pc etc etc, that is when she called me in, (I didn't get to see the BSD message ughh) she restarted and it goes to black screen top left says
A Disc Read Error Occurred press cntrl alt delete
when we do that we get the same message over and over, tried shut down and restart again same message also tryed (Cn/Al/De) same thing same message.
Problem is its midnight and tomorrow afternoon she has to have this spreadsheet for her boss and his peers for a meeting.
SO its midnight, im up searching for help and or answers, its a 600m, very well taken care of, about a year old, has antivirus on it and updated and running (doubt its a virus most of her pc work is in word or excel not internet), just tryin to figure out what I can try or do to if nothing else get to that file to save it via thumbdrive or something.
I am guessing MAYBE the Hard Drive is going bad, it sounds as if it is "cycling" fast slow fast slow, even while that message is showing, and there is nothing in the card reader, there is no floppy drive and the cdrom is also empty, I confirmed boot order is set to hard drive first yet it still gives that error and if you listen closely it sounds as if the Hard Drive spins up then goes down up down up down.
Also in F12 mode setup i ran a test mode everything passed but one thing did fail this was the report
DST Short Test
Failed
1000-0143
Msg: Unit 0: Drive Smart Read Command Failed
If anyone can help me on this please let me know what to try.
I don't think Dell sent actual xp discs with this maybe a restore disc, if I try that maybe i can choose repair if I can get it to boot from cdrom... But before trying to find the disc and doing that I thought I would ask around here a bit...
Bill
Anyways shes working on some important work files and a spread sheet, we are about to go to bed, she goes to shut down before bed and gets some blue screen of death that she said had a sentence about restart your pc etc etc, that is when she called me in, (I didn't get to see the BSD message ughh) she restarted and it goes to black screen top left says
A Disc Read Error Occurred press cntrl alt delete
when we do that we get the same message over and over, tried shut down and restart again same message also tryed (Cn/Al/De) same thing same message.
Problem is its midnight and tomorrow afternoon she has to have this spreadsheet for her boss and his peers for a meeting.
SO its midnight, im up searching for help and or answers, its a 600m, very well taken care of, about a year old, has antivirus on it and updated and running (doubt its a virus most of her pc work is in word or excel not internet), just tryin to figure out what I can try or do to if nothing else get to that file to save it via thumbdrive or something.
I am guessing MAYBE the Hard Drive is going bad, it sounds as if it is "cycling" fast slow fast slow, even while that message is showing, and there is nothing in the card reader, there is no floppy drive and the cdrom is also empty, I confirmed boot order is set to hard drive first yet it still gives that error and if you listen closely it sounds as if the Hard Drive spins up then goes down up down up down.
Also in F12 mode setup i ran a test mode everything passed but one thing did fail this was the report
DST Short Test
Failed
1000-0143
Msg: Unit 0: Drive Smart Read Command Failed
If anyone can help me on this please let me know what to try.
I don't think Dell sent actual xp discs with this maybe a restore disc, if I try that maybe i can choose repair if I can get it to boot from cdrom... But before trying to find the disc and doing that I thought I would ask around here a bit...
Bill
(not calling your Wife crazy by any means 
)
Unfortunetly the shady fujitsu I sold away which later I found out died on its owner. So my data is lost forever So now I try to keep a dvd back up of what ever I can when I have to as you all should.
and found I could get an adapter to hook my notebook drive up to my PC. This happened two years gao, but luckily, I save everything. The connector is described as:
