amiableadder

Ok so I bought my Dell about 3 months ago from their website. About two months after I bought it the hard drive started crapping out. I get the pxe-e61 "operating system not found" error. (I've been told it could either be the boot order, hard drive, or motherboard).

I called them and told them I want to send it in to replace my hard drive, and they said "Oh its probably just Vista, so we'll help you re-install it." At the time, I didn't know exactly what the problem was so I just went with it and they helped me reinstall Vista, and after about 4 hours they succeeded in installing it, but they didn't install my drivers correctly so I got to do that all on my own (it's not hard, but when you pay for a warranty you shouldn't have to do the work for them).

Well, I started getting the error again the next time I started it up (at this point I knew it couldn't be Vista unless I got a bad disk, which isn't likely).

So I did a little experiment and installed Ubuntu this time (deleted Vista completely so that it would rule out the buggy Vista theory) because I've always wanted to try it. It still had the same error on startup about 2/3 times (at this point I was 100% sure it wasn't Vista because I don't even have it on my computer).

Then I messed something up in Ubuntu so I had to re-install it completely (which I don't really mind because I hadn't really put anything on it and it only takes about 20 minutes to install).

It reinstalled fine. I downloaded the updates and it said I needed to restart, so I clicked restart. When it booted back up, some funny stuff happened with the screen (there was a line of blurry Ubuntu logos at the top of the screen instead of one crisp one in the middle) and it wouldn't load the Ubuntu login page

It could be the boot order for the operating system not found error, but that would be easy to fix.

The reason I think it is something wrong with the hdd or motherboard is because when I went to install Ubuntu the second time, the partition manager couldn't find any partitions on my computer to install it to. So I restarted my computer and it found the main partition and I re-installed it. BUT the third time I installed Ubuntu, it couldn't find the partition at all (I tried restarting about 5 times).


I'm thinking what happened is either my hard drive got knocked out of place a little and I could just slip it back in and it would work fine (but would that void the warranty since I would have to sort of take my computer apart?), or it's fried and I need a new one, or the motherboard is buggy and I need a new one.

The thing is, I REALLY don't want to send it back to Dell and have to wait a month, just so that they can put the same crappy model of hard drive or motherboard in, or they may even send it back like IBM did for my friend's computer (with a note saying "If it doesn't work, just smack it" [no joke]).

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Should I just buy a new hard drive ( the problem with that is it would void the warranty, and then if the original problem was actually the motherboard I wouldn't be able to send it in or afford a new one)?

Should I just get an external one (because you can run Ubuntu off of an external hard drive)?

My max budget is $150 if I need to buy something.

Or should I just send it in and hope they know what they're doing.

Right now I'm running the Ubuntu 9.04 demo thing off of a 700mb DVD so I can't really put anything on it. I just use it to check my email, youtube, and myspace until I figure out what to do with my $1,100 PoS .