Can't turn on computer since power failure in Dell XPS Gen 2

My PC is a Dell XPS Gen 2 desktop operating system are Windows XP Service P3 and is 6 years old. I have been receiving a short battery voltage notice for about two weeks but the system for all time boots and runs very well after pressing F1 at the prompt. Nut now i unable to on my computer. I talked to Dell customer care support for 3 hours and got nothing. They kept saying there was harm done for the reason that the system was power cut by the power failure even though I kept telling them the PC wasn't even on. He had me try to boot off the supply disk with the drivers and diagnostics on it but it won't boot from the cdrom. His lastly fix was to reinstall Windows, which I can't do for the reason that I have lots of files I hadn't backed up till now that I require from the PC. Have any thoughts for this situation?? Any suggestion is really respected.

I sense your difficulty is: RAID ON
If not you have a RAID setup with two hard drives, which you it seems that don't. You require changing that setting. Not confident what the options are in this system, but if the drivers which is SATA were installed, you desire somewhat like RAID AHCI/ Auto detect, or AHCI. If SATA drivers aren't installed, you desire RAID ATA /Auto detect. You definitely don't desire RAID ON. You should as well put the boot hard drive as primary in the hard-drive boot series.

Are you confident it's not a SATA drive, it’s an IDE drive? The error code [STOP: 0x0000007B] means the hard drive isn't detected. Assuming this is an IDE drive, open BIOS setup (reboot & press F2). Look for ‘Primary Drive 0’ and observe if your drive is properly identified there. Then search at the IDE Drive UDMA alternate settings. Not confident which one you require, but attempt every one of them, one at a time. lastly, search at the boot sequence and make confident the IDE hard drive is 1st on the list .Be certain to save the setting modification previous to exiting setup. And if you're lucky, you'll discover the right ones to boot from this drive.

The Dell XPS generation 2 desktop has analytic lights labeled abcd on the reverse of the system. The patterns they show can assist recognize the source of the difficulty. They also stay dark or light up yellow or green. The sense of the outline they light can be looked up here.

Yes you could take away the ide (or pata) type drive from your Del xps geneartion 2 and also put it in a 3.5" pata type usb field to attach it to one more system or use an ide to usb adapter cable. If you had a one more possibly older desktop PC at your removal then you could possibly momentarily attached the drive inside in that system so that you can copy your files without having to buy anything. Yes win 7 will be clever to read the files from a win xp disk. You may run into problems of safety but be anxious about that if occur to run into it (there are methods around it).

Following the idea of running a repair reinstall of XP after running the diagnostics ... if the data on the hard drive is of critical importance that you do not want to make many changes to disk before it is tested. Data recovery, as people datasavers.com is able to recover data from damaged disks, but it is monkeyed with the more difficult it becomes to recover the data. If you put the disk into a USB or connect to another PC and it is not legible, I would not say run check disk or other repair tools if the data is extremely valuable and not saved.

guys, you all are certainly a rock stars!!!!! I changed the RAID configuration and that did the trick. This community forum is the best. Thanks for all your help!