Dell Inspiron 8000 problems

[Noondi34]

Someone I know just recently gave me an Inspiron 8000 but he says the hard drive is messed up. I try to turn it on and it has the Dell loading screen, then the screen goes black, but then it just going back to the loading screen. It does that process over and over. The hard drive does make a suspicious clicking sound every time the screen goes black. The original OS was Windows ME but I'm not sure what it is now. Should I risk $60 (on newegg) and buy a new hard drive? What should I do?

[Retrac1324]

Before you do anything, you should figure out what OS it is. That will narrow down the problem and might help figure out what is wrong.

[Noondi34]

How do I figure out the OS?

[Tuf]

If it were me I would boot from a Boot Disk or a Linux Live CD and see if you can see the hard drive. I suspect the hard drive is either bad or not making a good connection in its carrier.

An I-8000 is definitely worth putting a hard drive in for general use if it has enough RAM and processing power for what you plan to do with it.

I use one with regularity for Office Apps, its still going strong after nearly five years.

[glc]

Regardless of what brand hard drive is in it, you can test it with Hitachi Drive Fitness Test. This will tell you if the drive is any good or not. If it's bad, replace it. If it's good, reformat it and reload an operating system.

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

You can download either a floppy creator or a bootable CD image.