Hello everyone Im having a problem with my Dell Inspiron 1100. Yesterday and before everything worked perfectly fine and today I tried to boot it after the Dell Logo a black screen came up and displayed the system info and this at the end:

PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel PXE ROM
Operating System not found

I googled it and searched here and from what I can tell it is a failed HDD or a BIOS problem. Ive reset and double checked it looking for any problems. So that would mean its a failed HDD? Is there any way to check that or if worse comes to worse save the 10 gigs of photos/other important data I have on it? Ive probably booted it a total of 6 maybe 7 times since this problem occured. Any help is greatly appreciated.

In a worse case scenario you can slave the drive in a desktop computer with an adapter to extract the data as long as the drive is not mechanically damaged.

Dell has this troubleshooter that you might try:

http://support.dell.com/support/topi...30030ABD6238A1

I don't know if you caught that link as Dell times out links after a bit.

To get to the troubleshooter go here:

http://support.dell.com/

Choose Inspiron then Technical FAQs

http://support.dell.com/support/topi...t/dsn/en/entry

Inspiron > 1100 > Go

Search: Operating System not found

Results:

Hard Disk Drive (HDD) Problem: Cannot Boot, Can´t Detect Drive, or Drive Reports Errors [ Dell™ Desktop, Portable, and Workstation Computers ]

Then follow the interactive troubleshooter.