My 9 year old Dell XPS 8300 desktop crashed recently. Upon start up windows would hang, go to a black screen with visible cursor for 1-2 hours, then go to a windows is repairing errors this may take over an hour type screen. I left it like this for a day and a half and restart with no change. Left it like that for two and a half days with no change. Tried booting windows from a USB, windows would hang for about 10 minutes then I'd get a blue screen with an error code but it restarted too quickly to read it. Booted from USB again and same thing happened.

Any advice on further troubleshooting this? I'm considering trying using the hard drive as an external drive on another computer. Thanks.

Well, let's try something a bit more sane than trying to run Windows from a USB drive and take a more diagnostic approach.


Most Dell machines have some kind of internal diagnostics in their firmware menus.

Failing that, you could probably probe things with a live Linux rescue disk.

probably memory error

I was able to run a diagnostic test previously and got the following message or similar:

Error code 2000-0142 validation 16663 message hard drive zero SN Z240592R self test unsuccessful status equals 7

Congratulations, your HDD is toast or near toast. Take it to a repair center and ask them to move/recover what they can, unless you had nothing important.

Yeah I figured but I was hoping there could be some further things to try.

The aforementioned live rescue might allow you to more peacefully and less expensively move your data yourself.

But if there's physical wear on the heads or the discs? There's really no way to fix that.

Backup your data ASAP. It's possible that the error is being triggered by a poorly connected HDD, but the most likely outcome is that your 9 year old HDD is on life support.

I would try to save any critical data before I did anything else. If the HDD is on the way out, then by trying other things you're wasting time, increasing wear and increasing the chance the drive dies without you saving your stuff.

I wonder if and why S.M.A.R.T. wasn't already complaining about it on boot up? At least it did for me on one old desktop (of a friend of mine) when its HDD started failing, so I scrambled to save any important data of his to an external USB drive (but in his case Windows still booted successfully, as the HDD started giving SMART warning signs early on, whenever you booted the machine).

So yeah like others suggested, try to copy your important data out of the HDD, either e.g. booting from an USB Windows or Linux (where that drive will be seen as a data disk), or remove it and connect it to another PC with e.g. one of these:

https://www.verkkokauppa.com/fi/product/19413/hbhdr/Fuj-tech-Clone-Dock-2-USB-3-0-telakka-kahdelle-2-5-3-5-SATA

Preferrably attach the hard drive to another computer in order to decrease the work the dying HDD has to do so you can try saving some stuff.

AFTER you have done that, you can check for other possible hardware problems.

I see plenty of good advice here. I would run a memtest to see in what shape the RAM is. Sometimes you can get corrupted data on your disk just because the memory was toast. It might be HDD or something else but you want to start checking different components one by one. Memory is easiest to check and at the same time the most likely cause.

Do you have a link that can guide me through the linux method?

I'll let the Linux users explain that one. Personally, I'd drop the HDD into a caddy and connect it by USB to another computer to copy the files off.

Not to put too much of a point on it, but it's basically an open world method; you sort of have to pick which works for you the best.

But the TL;DR is that you'll load/burn an ISO onto a USB drive, then boot into it. Probably via the one time boot menu accessed either under F12 or Delete while the system is first starting. So when you see the DELL logo.

From there, it's really a matter of logging into a graphical environment and taking a look around.

Keep a secondary device nearby.