I was on my laptop, Inspiron 8100, and everything was fine, no errors or anything. Took a break and when I came back my computer had a black screen. I tried to restart and it goes to the dell load page and windows Vista page but that’s it. It goes back and forth between the two pages. A blue screen pops up between them for about half a second. I took a picture of it so I could read it, the error code is 0x000000ed. After this when I restarted my laptop it showed me disk boot failure. Every time I tried to recover the HDD I failed and got the same message.
You can get the information about it here. Put the BIOS settings to their defaults. The harddisk might be forced to use UDMA mode.
The purpose of this behavior is to prevent potential data loss due to the use of an incorrect IDE cable for the faster UDMA modes or due to continued access to a drive on which the file system is damaged.
Note that a variety of issues can cause file system damage, from faulty hardware to software configuration problems or viruses. You can run Chkdsk /r at a command prompt to resolve the file system damage, but you may lose some data.
If you’ve restored the default BIOS settings, and you still have the problem, then the IDE controller is not supported by Vista.
I had similar problem. While installing Windows Vista, my HDD crashed. I tried every possible thing to get my data back. But, problem was I recreated partition table and data recovery seemed to be difficult. I contacted Salvage Data Recovery Lab at 76 Progress Drive Corporate Park; Stamford, CT 06902. They provided me the right software and
guided me to recover data. Thanks for their service and help. I got 100% of my data back.