Soldato
- Joined
- 7 Mar 2005
- Posts
- 19,612
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- LU7
I have a colleague's Dell Latitude D410 in front of me. It was given to me on Friday afternoon because it will not properly boot into Windows. It has previously been fine.
What is happening is that the bar on the Dell BIOS/POST screen fills up with white, apart from the last little section and then the screen goes black before it effectively restarts and its just sat here cycling.
I've checked the boot order and that seems fine. I've found an updated BIOS on the Dell site but I can't see how I can flash it as the laptop doesn't have a CD drive. Would an external USB optical drive work?
Any ideas as to the problem or how to resolve it?
Edit: Looks like the hard drive is knackered. We weren't sure if it was the BIOS or the drive. I've hooked the hard drive up to my work PC using an IDE/USB adapter and the first thing Windows asked when I plugged it in was did I want to format it.
I've also started a chkdsk and that isn't completing. It stops at 5% of verifying files in stage 1 of 3 and has stopped at 30288 processed file records from a total of 60576. It'll stay like that for a few minutes before chkdsk gives up. Is there any way to recover anything from this disk or is it kaput?
What is happening is that the bar on the Dell BIOS/POST screen fills up with white, apart from the last little section and then the screen goes black before it effectively restarts and its just sat here cycling.
I've checked the boot order and that seems fine. I've found an updated BIOS on the Dell site but I can't see how I can flash it as the laptop doesn't have a CD drive. Would an external USB optical drive work?
Any ideas as to the problem or how to resolve it?
Edit: Looks like the hard drive is knackered. We weren't sure if it was the BIOS or the drive. I've hooked the hard drive up to my work PC using an IDE/USB adapter and the first thing Windows asked when I plugged it in was did I want to format it.
I've also started a chkdsk and that isn't completing. It stops at 5% of verifying files in stage 1 of 3 and has stopped at 30288 processed file records from a total of 60576. It'll stay like that for a few minutes before chkdsk gives up. Is there any way to recover anything from this disk or is it kaput?
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