Dell inspiron 130

[Flarerguy]

My dell laptop (Inspiron b130) won't start up, whenever it gets past the windows screen, it goes to the black screen wit th the safe mode options. After i hit any of them, it goes to a blue screen saying: A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer. If this is the first time you've seen this stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screenappears again, follow these steps: Disable or uninstall any aintvirus, disk fragmentation, or backup utilities. Check your hard drick configuration, and check for any updated drivers. Run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart your computer. Technical info: ***STOP: 0X00000024 (0X00190203, 0x86DC8438, 0x00000000).My computer runs on either XP or Vista (I think it's xp). Please help.

[usually_quiet]

Looking at your error message, the hard drive has likely experienced some significant data corruption which prevents it from booting. You probably need a new hard drive and a fresh OS install to make the laptop functional again. The problem is that your laptop is made to use IDE drives, which are no longer produced. "New" replacement drives are consequently selling at inflated prices, so you would probably have to look for a working used one.

Based on the model number, your laptop is 7 or 8 years old and likely came with XP installed. Even when it was new, your laptop was only a budget model, so at this point you are probably better off getting a newer laptop than trying to fix what you have. It may be possible to recover at least some data from the original hard drive if you can find an external enclosure for IDE laptop drives.

[Flarerguy]

Thank you.

[usually_quiet]

In case you want to look for a used hard drive, according to one thread I found about your Dell, it only recognizes hard drives up to 120GB.

[ranchhand]

Flarerguy, you might want to test that hard drive to make sure it is failing. The error messages are helpful, but many times the problem generates a false message so you cannot always count on the message as gospel. You can use Seatools from Seagate, it is free and can be used to verify if your drive is bad or not. Here is my canned tutorial:
Download Seatools For DOS (free) from my link; in the site screen, click "DOWNLOADS" tab, then "Seatools For DOS". Burn it to a CD. Reboot with it in your drive. In the screen that appears, first check that SMART has (or has not) been tripped. Then click the upper left corner of the screen for the short test and let it run. It will notify you either Pass or Fail. This is from Seagate Corp. but will test all other drives, not just Seagate. This only takes a few minutes.
http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/#
If your hard drive passes with no errors, try a system restore to a saved restore point immediately before this problem occured. There are also other things you can try.

[classfour]

You may need to enter safe mode (F8 at the Dell splash screen).

If the machine boots into windows, you'll want to uninstall any updates; or run malwarebytes in safe mode.

If the machine doesn't boot - time for a new HDD at minimal - or new machine.

XP machines are more stable than Vista ones from my experience - neither are windows 7.