BleepingComputer.com: Difficulties with an old dell and a new hard drive

I am trying to bring my Zombie Dell back from the dead, but I think I may have met my match. It is an Inspiron 9200

It all started when my original HDD failed. In order to preserve some cash, and what seemed to be a perfectly decent computer, I decided to purchase a new hard drive and install an operating system. The drive that I bought was a Western Digital Scorpio Blue (WD3200BEVE) which I am confident is compatible with my computer. I physically installed it, check to make sure that my computer was recognizing it, then booted from my optical drive in order to install Windows XP from the Dell XP CD that came from with the computer. It all seemed to work fine until I had to reboot, at which point I started getting a bunch of IO errors, and of course when I attempted to boot from the HDD, it failed.

Then, being worried that I had larger problems than just the HDD, I decided to put a copy of Ubuntu onto a flash drive and run it from that (which is what I am currently working with as I write this email). That settled me because it seemed that the computer itself was working fine (video card, memory, processor). I then decided to try to insall Ubuntu to the HDD so that I could boot from there, and at least be taking a step in the right direction. This also worked just fine, until I was instructed to restart. Unfortunately I encountered errors again, and when I attempted to boot from HDD, I was given the message :

error : out of disk
grub rescue>

I am currently able to save information to the hard drive, and reopen it. It stays there when I shut down and reboot too, so although it could be something wrong with the hardware I purchased, I doubt it. I suspect that there may be a problem with my BIOS, however I am unsure of how to update it at this point. I don't know what to do at this point

This post has been edited by awsims: 23 October 2010 - 11:49 AM

I would suspect the optical drive, they are known to fail often and early, have you run some diagnositcs on the hard drive?

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic28744.html

Since the problem centers around hard drive access after you try to install an operating system but seems to work otherwise I would stay focused on the hard drive. I had similar problems with a drive on my wife's computer. It worked fine as a storage drive but once you installed an operating system on it of any kind it would not boot. I first scanned the drive for errors with the manufacturers diagnostic first which showed no errors. The solution was to use the manufacturers diagnostic utility to do a low level format of the hard drive. After that I had no more issues booting after installing the OS.