PC Help

[henry296]

Starting today my Dell laptop stopped booting. It gets to the Dell splash screen and stops booting little bit half way through the startup screen. As it is booting it clicks about 17 or 18 times.

Any thoughts on the problem? I've tried hitting F2 or F12 to try to enter some type of options / setup menu to try to figure out what is wrong.

Thanks.

[A-Husker-4-Life]

sounds like a hard drive is out.

[Scoobz0202]

Can you remove the case and pinpoint the exact place of clicking? My initial reaction would be hard drive, followed by MAYBE power supply?

[henry296]

Thanks for the responses.

i'm pretty sure now it is the hard drive. I was able to put in an old hard drive I had and it at least got past that point and tried some system restores, but of course it doesn't work because it was not configured for this particular laptop.

[MizzouRah]

HD

Turn the pc on and then hold the F12 key down when you see the Dell splashscreen. You should have some boot up options, one will be diagnostics, let it run.

If it makes some loud beeping noises, you should see a screen that has a HD error code on it. (bad HD)

[fantom1979]

If you have a newer desktop and the laptop is newish, you can plug the laptop harddrive into your desktop. They should both use sata connections. You might be able to recover any data before the hard drive completely dies (if it hasn't died already). You can also try one of these:

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00346I5LI/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=fantom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00346I5LI">Diablotek EN3525D Hard Drive Docking Station</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fantom-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B00346I5LI" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />

[henry296]

HD

Turn the pc on and then hold the F12 key down when you see the Dell splashscreen. You should have some boot up options, one will be diagnostics, let it run.

If it makes some loud beeping noises, you should see a screen that has a HD error code on it. (bad HD)

I can't even get the F12 to work, it seems to freeze before that even registers. At this point, I'm just trying to get my old hard drive to work in this new PC even if I have to just start over.

[stevew]

This happened to me, and sounds like my symptoms. If you want to get your setup going, and didn't burn a recovery disk, you can search for the .iso file of windows 7 from digital river.

I used that to install windows on my PC and used my Win7 license. Probably can find all your drivers on dell's site and put them on a flash drive.

[Scoobz0202]

I always just put the wireless driver on a flash drive, and then get the other drivers from the fresh install. Seems easier, but really, neither is difficult.

Use this site when you are up and running again. It is a fucking lovely site.

http://ninite.com/


Hopefully you get over this hurdle soon. That shit is annoying.

[henry296]

Here is the latest that I've tried. I put in my old hard drive which had Windows Vista on it. I was able to run the diagnostics and everything looks good.

However after doing a system restore, I still get put into the Startup Repair menu and it can't automatically repair.

I'm guessing there is some hardware incompatibility issue with my new PC and Vista.

Let me see if I can find that iso file. Any other thoughts on next steps.

[stevew]

Official Windows 7 SP1 ISO from Digital River « My Digital Life (http://www.mydigitallife.info/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-from-digital-river/)

It worked fine with windows authentic activation with my HP license but as with all these things ymmv

[sovereignstar v2]

Official Windows 7 SP1 ISO from Digital River « My Digital Life (http://www.mydigitallife.info/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-from-digital-river/)

It worked fine with windows authentic activation with my HP license but as with all these things ymmv

Not sure how he's going to burn that iso. lol

[stevew]

Im assuming he has a desktop? If not, yeah, LOL.

[henry296]

I tried downloading with my wife Mac with no luck, but luckily we had her old PC laptop. So far, I've downloaded the ISO onto a flash drive along with the install thing from Microsoft. Copied the ISO to the desktop of the laptop with fried HD that I installed Vista and working on converting flash drive into boot install.

[henry296]

Latest update...

I got Windows 7 64 bit installed and I'm actually typing this message from that computer, so I got the wireless card working. The biggest issue right now is a flashing screen. I'm hoping it is a video card driver which I'm downloading now. If I got to Device Manager it just shows a standard VGA monitor. The other issue is my touchpad doesn't work. I might've done something when swapping the hard drives.

[henry296]

Yep, video driver solved the problem. I seem to be back in business, just with a smaller hard drive.