Trouble Shooting Dell Inspiron 518/519 Computer Problems

It sounds like you have several bad sectors on the hard drive. You can run chkdsk for a work around. Here's a Microsoft article on how to initiate it: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315265. I typically run it from Windows Explorer, check both the boxes, click 'Start', click 'Yes' and then restart the machine. It will give a message that a check disk has been scheduled and a count down to press a key to avoid running it. Just let the count down go through and it should begin 'Checking file system on C:'. Eventually it will complete and reboot the system automatically. A note of caution; it should take between 30 minutes and several hours to complete the process, depending on the size of the drive and the amount of errors it finds, and should not be interrupted once started.

The problem is that many times if you have several bad sectors, others may go quickly and one day you'll not be able to access the drive at all. If you decide to keep the hard drive as long as you can, be sure to backup your information to an external source frequently!

Here's a link to hard drives compatible with your system: http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/category.aspx?c=us&category_id=6994&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&mfgpid=198230&chassisid=8474&~ck=anav. Keep in mind these are blank drives and you'll need to install the operating system, drivers and additional programs from the discs that came with the system originally. If you didn't get the original CD's here's a link to order them: https://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dellcare/en/backupcd_form

I hope this is helpful to you!

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