big problem

[Chris71]

I read through some other posts with similar problems and have no idea how to get the info needed. Last night around 5:30am my husband woke up because my computer was clicking loudly and the screen said "No boot devices were found-system halted." I turned it off and went back to bed. When I got up later I turned it on and it began clicking again and went through the first warmup stuff and then got the "No boot devices. . ." message again. Tried ctrl-alt-delete and it went through the sequence again. I have not recently installed anything and last night when I checked emails everything seemed to be working fine. I really don't know anything about computers but I love the thing and hope it's not dead! It's an older Dell Dimension desktop. I don't have any of the set up disks that go with it. I'm guessing I will need to take it somewhere to be repaired or declared dead but was hoping someone here could help. I searched online for possible solutions but don't understand all the terms and am afraid I will make it worse.

[ktkendall]

Usually that "clicking" noise is the hard drive. I call it the click of death. It's usually the little arm in the drive that reads the information from the disk, and that sound usually means the arm is bad and can not read from the disk anymore. One possible test to be sure is to boot up from your windows cdrom disk and see if you can read from the hard drive. If you don't have any windows disks though then you probably can't try that. Other than fans, that little arm is basically the only mechanical moving part inside most PC's and that is why it is very likely the culprit in your case as to which component has gone bad, along with the error message you are getting pretty much also tells you that the hard drive can not be read from anymore. It depends how well you feel about replacing the drive your self as the whether you want to take it in for repair. Since you have no disks though and that is an older PC, and new ones are probably as cheap as you will spend to buy a windows disk and have a shop fix that one for you, it may be time for a new PC. Hopefully you do at least have anything you were really concerned about saving, like documents or pictures saved on removable media somewhere, because anything on that old hard drive may end up being lost.

[Chris71]

I am looking everywhere for the CD disk-I'm afraid it may have gotten thrown out in my last move. IF I can find it, how do I boot from that? Will it do it automatically from inserting it? I noticed you could go into set up and it shows that my CD Rom is the first boot device-is it possible the CD Rom is broken but the hard drive is still ok? (Yes, I backed up MOST of my files, but I of course am thinking of stuff I didn't back up yet-I know, I know, STUPID) I realize it's probably time to buy a new PC, and I'm ok with that, but would like to just get in one more time to check that I have all the files I need. Can I change it so that it boots up from the hard drive first? Or just take it to the store and have them mess with it? Thanks for your help. It's stopped clicking by the way-don't know if it got tired or what. :)

[not important]

You can set the HDD as the first boot in the Bios but it sounds like your HDD is shot. You can purchase another HDD and "possibly" get any important data from the old one by slaving it to the new one or by using a HDD to USB connector.

[glc]

Bottom line - your hard drive has failed, if you want to bring that computer back to life it needs to be replaced, then everything reinstalled from CD. You may legally use any Dell Windows reinstall CD that is the same version of Windows that's on the case COA sticker (i.e. XP Home), see if you have any friends with one to borrow. You will also need all the drivers and utilities for that model, and software to reinstall.