So I have my in law's Dell desktop running XP professional. I brought it to our house to try and make it work faster. I deleted an AOL spyware program and the AOL security center clear cookies and temp files and not much else. It was working great running as fast as a 6 year old computer can run. I never connected it to my internet connection. I had restarted it and then used a couple programs to see how quickly they would open. No problems. I showed the wife and then shut it down and unplugged it from the power supply. I took it to the in laws and hooked it up. The dell screen came on then a black screen with an underscore in the top left hand corner appeared for about a second then the following keys flashed and shut off: Num lock, Caps Lock, and Scroll lock. then the screen went black. A second later the screen with the underscore came on and it repeated that till I shut it off manually. I turned it back on and hit F8. I tried to start in safe mode and it did the same thing. I hit F8 and chose to restart at last known good point. Same thing. I shut it down and brought it home. Same thing is happening here. I'm utterly confused. Oh yeah, the disk drive is broken and I was gonna replace it with a used one from a friends old computer. I do have the Windows XP disk. Any thoughts?
Dell desktop won't boot
Submitted by p to the izzle on August 17, 2007 - 7:48pm.
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
September 14, 2007 - 1:12am
So I have my in law's Dell desktop running XP professional. I brought it to our house to try and make it work faster. I deleted an AOL spyware program and the AOL security center clear cookies and temp files and not much else. It was working great running as fast as a 6 year old computer can run. I never connected it to my internet connection. I had restarted it and then used a couple programs to see how quickly they would open. No problems. I showed the wife and then shut it down and unplugged it from the power supply. I took it to the in laws and hooked it up. The dell screen came on then a black screen with an underscore in the top left hand corner appeared for about a second then the following keys flashed and shut off: Num lock, Caps Lock, and Scroll lock. then the screen went black. A second later the screen with the underscore came on and it repeated that till I shut it off manually. I turned it back on and hit F8. I tried to start in safe mode and it did the same thing. I hit F8 and chose to restart at last known good point. Same thing. I shut it down and brought it home. Same thing is happening here. I'm utterly confused. Oh yeah, the disk drive is broken and I was gonna replace it with a used one from a friends old computer. I do have the Windows XP disk. Any thoughts?
Dell GX series by any chance?
Dells are modular in design and sometimes moving them around can shake their graphics card, sound card, memory cards, or even the Processor loose, not to mention the wires and cables on the drives and such cause of the tight confines.
When you turn your computer on is there a yellow flashing light on the button?
If so then something is loose.
If the light is green but there is nothing then the Bios needs to be rebooted as constantly turning a dell on and off in quick succesion causes a "circut breaker" effect to save the Bios from frying You'll need to look up your specific dell's motherboards diagram to find the rebbot bios jumper(s) as they are in different places on different models.
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 10:33am
it sounds more like software to me. You can get a CD drive for about $10 off Newegg, so that shouldn't be that big a deal . And really, if worse comes to worse you could always just swap out a CD drive from your own computer just so you can install the software. Once you have it figured out how your going to reload the system, it's just a matter of backing up data you want to preserve; hoping that your filing system(s) are fully intact, this should be as simply as installing a sufficiently large spare hard drive and then either using a LiveCD with support for whatever filing system(s) you have to access, or installing an OS to the spare drive. Oh, if your LiveCD of choice does not support writing to NTFS or FAT, or your spare drive needs formatting and you can't format to NTFS or FAT, just use EXT2, because later you can install EXT2 IFS and that will allow you to read EXT2 partitions from Windows....
so I think I got most of the bases covered there, but if it is indeed blown capacitors, there's no point in going through all that hassle. If you've not soldered before you might want to buy a breadboard (ask about this when your buying soldering equipment) and experiment first, but this really shouldn't be too hard.
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 10:43am
Oh yeah, I never thought of using my cd drive. I did however take her HD and put it in my computer. I made a back up on my HD and am burning her a DVD back up as well. The HD seems to be fine. Everything is there. I can't see any obvious problems with the motherboard. There's a small section hidden behind the power supply. If the hard drive is fine what else would stop it from loading? My wife's mom said today that her dad's computer did the same thing and he doesn't have virus protection. He sends her e-mails all the time. The Dell has AVG on it and is up to date. I guess now that it's backed up I'll swap drives and reinstall XP.
"I'm just like you only shorter."
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 10:59am
>>>I can get to the screen with F8
So you can see the safe mode boot options?
Are you able to see the "Enable VGA Mode" under the advanced Windows Menu in Safe mode?
It possibly sounds like that video driver may be wacky - particularly if you hooked the PC into another monitor while fixing it.
I would try that. There are a few things to kick around - I definitely agree with unhooking the power and IDE cable from the CD Rom. When you do - re-seat the video card and memory for the heck of it.
If you're working on it now - I can kick back for a few hours and advise....
I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use. -Galileo Galilei
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 12:28pm
And things go down hill.....I took the drive out of my computer and put it back in hers. Now when I turn on the computer the HD clicks in a steady pattern. A dell screen appears. Then the HD stops. A message appears to insert a boot disk in floppy A.
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 1:06pm
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 1:37pm
Sorry, was a little distracted.
and if somehow this post shows up in Bold text...
Anyway, go to this link and burn a CD/floppy, and then boot from it.
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools
Do the 90 second quick test and the full test if the quick test shows clean.
I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use. -Galileo Galilei
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 2:17pm
Ok, I downloaded SeaToolsDOS.iso and burned it to a cd. I restarted the Dell and it didn't boot from the cd. I opened the drive and closed it again. Still nothing. I restarted the Dell again. Still nothing. Should I be doing this with the HD plugged into my computer or the Dell? Before I go any further I want to say Thanks for the time you've put in so far. Really, it's awesome. I do appreciate it.
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 2:20pm
Are we still dealing with the bad CD Rom? If that's the case, use a floppy.
Otherwise go into BIOS and change the boot order to boot from the CD first (F2 or Delete, usually) or try pressing F12 on start up to select the boot device.
I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use. -Galileo Galilei
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 2:28pm
>>>I've already recovered all the info off the HD. Is there any point in going further?
Well, no. It's just habit.
You want to be 100 percent sure that, that is the problem. You see, try as you may, when things go wrong on your "shift" or when attempting to fix a computer problem, you will be regarded with suspicion for the rest of your computer fixing career.
It's unavoidable. However, if you can look them straight in the eye and say, "well, Seatool HD diagnostics showed multiple incongruities in sectors Blah, blah and Blah, which in turn suggest that your older hard drive has been failing for sometime now...."
Well, I think you get the picture.
I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use. -Galileo Galilei
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 2:51pm
You could try another Cd Rom??? Like the one from your computer. It may save you a trip to the store.
Just see if the BIOS recognizes it.
I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use. -Galileo Galilei
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 3:04pm
Fine.
We'll go the hard way. Download the floppy DOS and install on a formated floppy - which is large enough to support it.
Place the floppy in the drive and boot
When prompted from drive a:
type dir
Which will bring up the directory menu
then type the .exe file that is associated with it.
Does that make sense?
I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use. -Galileo Galilei
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 3:36pm
It keeps telling me to insert a bigger floppy. I have a 1.44MB floppy. I found a Dell Diagnostic disk. It said the C drive does not contain a valid fat partition. It brought up a list of things and I tried check disk and scan disk but it would only scan the floppy drive. If it's time to give up just tell me. If there's still hope I'll keep trying.
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 3:50pm
Okay.
If you have access to scan disk and checkdisk, try this.
First, type in:
cd c:
then
chkdsk /p
If it runs and finishes then try:
chkdsk /r
Then try booting from the HD.
After that we'll call it a day.
I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use. -Galileo Galilei
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 4:03pm
I went in and the typed cd c: and it created a C:\ but then went to the next line and made another A:\. Every time I entered what you put it either gave me an error too many characters or checked the A drive again. I guess I'm done. I didn't want to go out like this but it appears I will. Ashton, thank you very much for your help. You went above and beyond with the help you gave me. I may not have a report from a Seagate tool to give them but I can tell them about the help I got from you. Thank you. I hope that one day I can repay you with help in some other area.
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 4:10pm
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 4:15pm
Oh yeah,
and tell them another IT guy agrees that the HD is shot - as evidenced by the return to the A:\ drive.
You did good getting the data before the final crash.
I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use. -Galileo Galilei
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 19, 2007 - 5:32am
I did tell them. I said that a guy who does IT work helped me forever and that everything he told me to do failed. Then I told her about the clicking sound the hard drive made. She then said, "It's done that before. Mark thought that was someone trying to break in." Then she described how he would shake the computer side to side and smack the side of it. Also, how the picture on the monitor would go screwy. This computer used to have windows ME on it. So last night we went and got them a new one. They are pretty excited about it. Now if I could get them off dial up........But again thanks for the amount of time and effort you put into it.
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 2:13pm
To elaborate a little further:
You're basically using this utility to check for errors on sectors of the HD. If they show up - then you know it's a bad HD.
We can then talk about making the bad HD into a slave drive and attempting to recover what information that we can.
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 5:05am
There are a few things that could cause constant rebooting, a power supply going bad, a virus, or possibly a bad boot sector. I'm sure there are other causes, but these are what come to mind.
Can you still get to the start up menu by hitting F8? If you can, there should be an option somewhere to "Disable automatic restart on system failure" or something to that effect. Ideally, what should happen it that at the point where Windows fails to load, you should get the blue screen of death. I know this doesn't fix the problem, but you might be able to search the internet for the BSOD stop error message and find your solution.
Another thing to try is to take the battery out of the motherboard for a couple hours. I know it sounds insignificant, but sometimes that can do the trick.
Hope this helps! And if it doesn't, there's always a baseball bat or a hammer...
"If drinkin' beer and playing Atari is wrong, I don't want to be right."
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 7:20am
I can get to the screen with F8. I tried the Disable automatic restart on system failure and it pot me the Dell logo screen for a few extra seconds and then a start up type screen that told me it recognized my mouse and keyboard and then it went back to the same old. Black screen and then screen with an underscore in the top left. I tried removing the battery from the motherboard and no difference. I left it out for an hour. I'll take the battery out and leave it out for a few hours this time. Any other ideas would be appreciated.
"I'm just like you only shorter."
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 7:40am
I'm pretty much out of ideas...
I'm sure you've probably tried the "last known good configuration" option. Is there a set of recovery disks for it? You said it is a Dell, usually their computers come with a diagnostic CD, if you could get your hands on that, it might help.
--
"If drinkin' beer and playing Atari is wrong, I don't want to be right."
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 7:45am
I did try last know, I have some of the disks but not all. They have a disk for XP and some of the driver disks but no diagnostic disk. All of which is useless since I haven't gotten my hands on the replacement cd drive. My friend went out of town today to hang with one of our out of town friends. That's assuming he'll let me take his old computer apart. I think her parents are going to buy a new computer soon but that's not the point. Right now it's about redemption. I worked on it now it doesn't work. I just hope they know I didn't do very much to it. Mostly I want to try to recover some of the stuff from their computer. They don't do back ups. They didn't even know if the drive was capable of burning. Thank you though for the help you did give.
"I'm just like you only shorter."
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Re: Dell desktop won't boot
August 18, 2007 - 8:06am
I'm sure it wasn't anything that you did, maybe it's a hardware problem that was just waiting to go awry once it got into your hands.
Okay, I was thinking (bad habit, it usually get's me into trouble)...
My mom's computer was exhibiting the same behavior, but it started out rather erratic. It would shut down for no reason from time to time, and then all of a sudden it started the constant restarting like you are describing. Turns out that the mobos that HP was using at the time were famous for caps going bad. Upon further inspection, I found that there were 3 leaking/bulging caps on the motherboard.
Remembering this got me thinking about it, and after a little research, I found that Dell had the same problem with some of their motherboards. You could try checking the motherboard for any capacitors that are leaking or bulging. The bad news is that if this is the case, you really can't do anything to fix it except get a new mobo, and for a computer that old, they are better off buying a new computer. In my case, my mom decided to let my husband and I experiment on her computer...we just replaced the bad caps and her computer was as good as new and is still running two years later.
Anyway, just another useless idea...
"If drinkin' beer and playing Atari is wrong, I don't want to be right."
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