Posted on 12/11/2005 7:05:52 PM PST by Slump Tester
I need advice from anyone having experience setting up a dell notebook. I build desktops but have never done anything with notebooks.
I have an Inspiron 6000 that I bought as a refurb from the Dell outlet. (Like an idiot, I didn't buy the warranty.)
It appears that the hard drive is bad, as after the Dell screen, the system never boots to windows. It just stays black. (I did have a BSD earlier.)
I booted from an XP install cd, and it saw 3 partitions:
The first one was a fat, and was 55Mb.
The second on had a "-" on the left, said "unknown" and was 71Gb. (It said there was 71Gb free.)
The 3rd one was about 5Gb, and was a fat32.
I powered up with the HD out, and was able to get into the setup, so that's on a rom. It appears one of those 2 smaller partitions has diagnostics. (which DO work, and say there is a HD error while waiting for "not busy"), but what is the other small one for?
There is no floppy drive, so my next step after posting this is to make a bootable CD with some dos stuff on it so I can look at the 2 wierd partions.
If I get a new hd, how do I get these "stripes" back? The only thing that came with it is a CD that appears to just be an XP Home install cd.
I thought Compaq was the only ones to do this BS. Am I screwed, or can I just get a new HD and set up 1 big NTFS partition?
You can get a new HD and just setup a single partition.
If you really want to setup the new HD as Dell did, you can probably download a bootable CD image from their website.
Don't forget to have a BFH handy.
Before doing anything drastic, as the machine boots, at the Dell screen, hit F8 repeatedly. Hopefully you will get a menu, choose "Safe Mode" and let us know if it starts up....
Bump because I might need this advice soon too.
#1-its Dell, Dells suck, #2-just get a new hard drive, install Windows on it, and #3- what's a BFD?
Bttt
LOL...You got that right.EFIN COMPS!.
Curious... have seen quite a few computer related posts recently here at FR-
When did this become the national computer helpdesk??
Sorry to be harsh but this is a news/political forum.. correct??
Spare pair of shorts? Or is that BVD?
A BFD is a Big Fu@#ing Deal
A BFH is a Big Fu@#ing Hammer
BFH... Big F'n Hammer? Those help sometimes.
I ran SpinRite on a couple of my Dell computers, and discovered that there was a small partition on each of their hard drives that that is dedicated to Dell, possibly for purposes of remote access if you choose to give their techs access. At least that's about the only use I can imagine it has.
I don't know if it would work, but you might try having a look at GibsonResearch's SpinRite. It looks at the hard drive at a deep level and can detect and isolate problems before they lead to disk death. I don't know if you can recover a disk with it in the state you describe it, but I have found it to be a pretty good program, and like most of Gibson's programs it seems to be elegantly written.
FRee Republic is a forum. It is what it is made by those who post.
Posts like this usually end up in chat, but we FReepers tend to help each other out in alot of ways. "I need help picking a gun" etc... Consider it all part of collective activism.
FREE Republic; that's means you are FREE to skip over the posts that don't interest you.
On the left side of your laptop, where you would place a PCMCIA card is a caddy for your hard drive. It is attached by two screws. You unscrew them and pull it out. Fairly simple, hardware wise. Then you boot from CD onto the hard drive and reformat and reinstall Windows.
Why can't you do that with the existing hard drive?
LOL! Hang around awhile and you will see all sorts of stuff.
The problem, in this case, was a fellow said the HD appeared to be just a bit too large for the case.
The computer expert advised him that he should coat it with some of that Y2K jelly and then he should be able to just slide it right in!
Hope this helps ;-)
Oh, well try having your motherboard replaced twice by Dell, four months apart. I have the Dell Inspiron 600m, and so far the touchpad came lose in the casing, Dell refused to take it back because they considered it out of warranty by means of physical abuse (I hadn't ever even dropped it), the USB ports went bad, the motherboard fried twice, one of the batteries completely fizzled out (the battery was old, they shipped me an old, unused battery, like 2 years old), and ever so often the monitor flickers, primarily right when I take it off ac power.
So if these are the quality of products Dell ships, than expect for there to be problems, and expect Dell to give you the wrap-around. I had to replace the motherboard, twice, myself. I had to replace the battery, which isn't really anything difficult (actually even a "mentally challenged" person can do it). So I spent the amount of money two-fold to fix my notebook. I'm thinking about getting a sony vaio or the new T-43 Lenovo Thinkpad with 1GB RAM and ATI graphics card, 802.11a/b/g wireless built in, etc.
But yeah, and several of the top consumer advocates have come out against Dell right now. I believe there was the top one coming out either right before or right after Rush.
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