Hello,
You might need to borrow another hard disk drive from your friend or relatives and try it on your laptop. If it still does not work, then we can assume that the laptop needs repair with the hard disk drive port.
Hope this helps in resolving the issue...
If you are having trouble opening a CD drive, see if there is a pinhole on the drive. If yes, try unfolding a paperclip, and sticking it straight into the pinhole.
Google ophcrack for vista. Download and burn to a cd. Set laptop to boot to cd drive f12 on start up I belive. Let it do its thing and It should pop up with any passwords it can find.
Hope this helps.
if he was very tech savvy, you're pretty much done unless you buy a specialty tool to do the job. If he wasn't there's a number of tricks you can try. The first thing I'd try is to hold down the F8 key and tell Windows to boot in safe mode.
Barring that, if you're not tech savvy yourself, you're going to be pretty stuck. The password system was designed to keep what you're trying to do from happening.
If you have a Linux machine, though, you could hook the hard drive up to that and you might have better luck rummaging around in the file system as root that way.
The easiest and quickest way to reset the forgotten Windows password will be reset disk and reset software. If you have prepared a reset disk before that will be better. If not, you need not be worried about it. You can download the safe and effective software, Anmosoft Windows Password Reset, from
http://www.resetwindowspassword.com
BIOS Master Password Generator for Laptops click the link and enter your service tag #. Usually found on the bios screen or under the laptop on a little white sticker. If it doesn't work you'll have to contact dell for removal.
The best solution for a lost password on a BIOS lock is to call Dell Technical Support and give them that System # number. They can use it to provide the unlock code... After they validate your ownership of the laptop.
This might help you out --> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315403 It basically says that you have to go into the Recovery Console and run chkdsk /r. Also this site has a fix for this type of STOP error that you can try to install after you are able to run chkdsk /r on the hard drive. Let me know if you need any more assistance with how to get into the recovery console, installing the update, etc....