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Windows won't boot, system repair fail, error 2000-0146, knoppix cd
Last night I shut my Dell Inspiron N5010 down and came home. When I got home, windows wouldn't load. It stuck on the starting windows screen. I tried to boot in safe mode, it got stuck in mid boot. I tried to boot it with system repair, it said it was loading files and then it got stuck on a screen that said copyright Microsoft Corporation and had a green loading bar. My husband's laptop is exactly the same as mine, so I used it to create a system repair cd. I set the laptop up to boot from cd and tried it, but I got the same thing with it sticking on the green loading bar. I ran a diagnostics on my computer and everything passed except a hard drive test in which I got the error 2000-0146. I checked that error on the dell support website and it told me to take the hard drive out and plug it back in. I have not done this yet as the instructions to do so required me to disassemble the whole computer just to get at the hard drive. After some online research, I created a Knoppix (Linux based os) 6.7 boot cd and booted from the cd drive. This worked beautifully and I am now in the process of transferring all my important data from the hard drive to an external hard drive.
So here are my questions. Everything I read about error 2000-0146 says it's a hard drive failure but if that were the case, why does the hard drive seem to work fine when accessed from a Linux OS? Also, how would disconnecting and reconnecting the hard drive fix the problem? I really don't want to take it apart if I don't have too. Could the windows boot files somehow be corrupted causing it not to boot, and if so could I access them with Knoppix and replace them with good files?
My computer is out of warranty, and I would just as soon fix it myself f possible. Any help and/or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Additional info, system is about a year and a half old, running windows 7 home professional 64 bit, OEM factory installed.
Last edited by Arainais; 18 Jun 2012 at 10:39. Reason: Added info