Trying to Wipe Hard drive but Dvd player dosent reconize the disk

Use the Restoration Disk. When asked choose Repair.
(Non-Destructive Installation)

You are missing basic Windows files. Boot loader files.
Also you may have to prepare to replace the harddrive. May have bad Sectors on it.
Means I would copy off all personal information, after getting that laptop going again, or you may lose it.

Regards,
joecoolvette

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTLDR

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/hard-disk.htm

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/hard-disk7.htm

It should be able to boot from the DVD or CD rom drives before checking the hard drive by default, but somebody could have changed bios settings which could cause it to not work. The factory (OEM) restore disk is DVD media, so you would need to use the DVD drive.

F2 during bootup to enter BIOS and check your boot sequence to make sure that the DVD drive comes before the hard drive. Also, the card reader on D400's tend to fail and no longer work, so it may be a good idea to dissable that from the boot sequence. The card reader can usually be found as a USB device in the boot sequence menu.

Open your computer and de-assemble the hard disk, clean data buses and ports and reassemble the hard disk, it will work.

format it using the an operating system installation cd.

You probably will need to replace the optical drive (CD/DVD drive) in your laptop. Go to Google and search for "Dell Inspirion 6000 CD/DVD drive" to find a replacement.
To be sure it's the CD/DVD drive that's defective and not your operating system software, you could also try to boot from a boot-able DVD disk.

If it has windows xp, vista, or 7 then you can go to help and type in 'recovery' or 'restore' to an earlier date.

If you Recover, then it will go to the first day the computer was used and that is done without recovery disks.

Many if not all computers nowadays do not come with disks, but rely on the image stored ont he hard drive.

Installing Windows 98, is you need a start-up disk (floppy disk) first before you can use the Windows 98 cd. The start-up disk will perform the partitioning and formatting of the HD...doing this, you have to boot from floppy drive first---after partitioning and formatting, you have change again the boot sequence to boot from cd then you can start the installation of Windows 98.

You need the C521 recovery disk, from Dell. Set the BIOS to boot from CD and start the system.

If it gives you the option of "Complete Reinstall" or "Repair", choose Complete Reinstall.

If it does not, or if it does not work - i.e., it always reads the disk and tries to maintain as much data as it can, you need to first wipe out the hard drive; there are many "Disk Wipe" utilities out there. I'd suggest using a boot disk such as DBAN (www.dban.org).

Now days there is a separate partition to reinstall from. on dell machines im sure you press ctrl+f11 during boot to activate it.

If you really want to wipe the hard drive you've got to use dban.

Here's the link.

http://www.dban.org/download

Unless of course you want someone to recover your files from your "wiped" hard drive.