[Muffin49]

Yay! I'm so glad I found this forum!

I've posted elsewhere, but I haven't received many replies.

Long story short...

I received a Dell Inspiron Mini 910 from my dad. It is in good condition, battery works, and it turns on. However upon booting, it says:
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable.
PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM.
Operating System not found

Bios says:
Fixed HDD: STEC PATA 32GB-(PM)
HDD Size: 0MB

Dad says he had that message suddenly appear one day, even though Mini had been working fine. From then on, he couldn't use it...so he trashed it...and I took it.

I made a bootable USB for Dell's Reinstallation CD for Windows XP. (Microsoft's Windows XP CD wouldn't work.) It began to work, but I ran into this problem:

Is it dead? Is there any way to test if it's dead? Can I use Knoppix TestDisk (not sure if that would work...)?

Should I bake it? I read online that you can bake hard drives to "fix" them, although this isn't my first choice. I didn't know if it would work with a half mini PCI-e.

Thanks for the help!

[darknessblade]

you should try installing ubuntu first, this solves some problems.
odly it works then, tried installing winxp first, failed
tried ubuntu -> xp instal {that worked}

[holmes4]

There's no problem here that I can see. Press D to delete the existing C partition and install to the unpartitioned space.

Your Mini 9 has an SSD - baking it isn't going to help.

The BIOS saying zero size is interesting - this is usually a symptom of a failing SSD and yours is the original as shipped by Dell in 2008-2009. That the XP install can see it, though, suggests to me it is still working.