Things I've found useful

A couple of times now I have had a drive fail on a dell desktop machine. I always replace the drive immediately with a drive I have spare, THEN ring Dell support.

The good thing about doing this is that your desktop is back in operation quickly
The bad thing about doing this is dell will want to make you jump through hoops to try and ‘diagnose’ that your hard disk is dead.

I got caught with having to put the dead drive back in the machine and jumping through these hoops. But I took pictures, so the next time I’ll just read off what is in these screenshots and make it sound like I’m doing what their stupid form filling support gibbon wants me to do.

The first thing I was asked to do was to read out the Boot Sequence from the BIOS. Tell them that it looks like this:

The second thing I was asked to do is to read out the details of drive attached to SATA-0, tell them it looks something like this.

Then the nice gibbon asked me to press F12 and choose IDE hard disk diagnostics, while it is running tell them that it looks like this:

After it has completed (wait a couple of minutes before reading this out to them) tell them that it looks like this, The important thing is the Return Code.

They will probably then ask you to format the drive, so tell them that you are and read off all these errors, just make out they are scrolling off the top of the screen to fast to read but give them the odd tit-bit, ‘UncorrectableError’ or the like.

After this I was asked to run the diagnostics from the CD that came with the machine, I exploded and screamed until I got a manager at this point because I had already been on the phone for an hour. The manager agreed to let me have a new drive sent out without having to run this diagnostics CD. If I’m not so lucky next time I’ll add more screen shots.