Dell's thoughts


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Subject: Dell's thoughts
Name: Kenny
Date: 10/19/2005 12:51:21 PM (GMT-7)
IP Address: 67.139.132.26
In Reply to: Re: System won't boot posted by ludicrous
Message:

Hmm

Well I came back in today, the user said she tried using it, pressing F1 to get passed the 'out of range' error message. After a few minutes it locked up again.

When I got to it I tried booting off the resource CD and it was still at this point giving the out of range error, but i pressed f1 and it booted off the CD. I was going to run a hard drive diagnostic, but apparently that test wasn't available on this resource CD (though many other tests were)

So I exited out of that. Since then the last several boot attempts have just yielded the "Strike F1 to retry boot" message.

I called up Dell tech to see what they thought. He had me check the LED light pattern on the back: A B C were green, D was orange. He said this means "unknown hard error"

He had me reseat all the IDE cables.

His only further suggestions were replacing the IDE cables, or hooking the HD up to another computer to run a diagnostic, but his best recommendation is that the motherboard is failing. He said if it was just a failing hard drive, you would get past the BIOS screen and just see a blinking cursor, or a message like no system disk, it wouldn't affect the other IDE drives. Said it might cause the computer to do nothing at all too, not POST whatsoever, but that would only be on a laptop system.

Seems like it might be time to trash this one.

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