BSOD on XP Home reinstall

Hi Moira,

I am sorry I forgot to mention that the Dimension 9100 shipped with DDR2 PC4200 memory. Eileen has a Dimension 8100 which uses Rambus RDRAM PC800................. even more exotic!

I think that what must have happened is your Dad will have overwritten the hidden recovery partition when he formatted. The recovery disk is little more than a boot disk that lets you access the recovery partition, so it won't find anything now.

I also suspect that the MBR has been corrupted, which could be why the XP installation cannot find the disk properly.

Overwriting the whole disk should present it with what appears to be a brand new HDD. Normally I would use the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic tool for this, as I think that there is a better chance of error detection and remediation.

However, DBAN should wipe the drive and I would expect it to display messages if there are physical problems with the disk.

One thing to check:

Go into "Set Up" (should be F2) and look for an entry like:

Primary Drive 0...............................................Hard Drive

Open that and make sure that it is set to "Auto"

Scroll down and find the entry:

PC Speaker.........................................On

That should get you any BIOS beep codes.

Then:

Fast Boot............................................Off

You will have a better chance of catching BIOS error messages that way ;)

Thanks nihil! In fact, after 3 days over there, the computer is now over here and in a worse state than ever. At the end of day one, I left it running DBAN because it was blue screening every boot. The next day I arrived to find every boot attempt getting as far as the BIOS (well, the POST I suppose) and then telling me there was no C drive. Attempts to install my copy of XP Pro got as far as the place where you choose a hard drive for the install, then it would say there was "no hard disk" to install the OS to. I spent the rest of that day running check utilities that had come with the Dell (it was still allowing me access to the CD ROM), then went home. Every test (and I did the hard drive tests thoroughly) came out perfect.

Day three - and the next "attack" was to swap memory for DDR2 I had bought ready for the upgrade. However, by accident I noticed the "recovery" disc had advanced as far as formatting the drive (no doubt made accessible again after DBAN), so a thorough format followed by an install was done. It was at this point I realised Dad didn't have restore discs, he had a full copy of XP Home on CD. He'd been right when he had told me he was reinstalling XP from scratch! And I think his "hidden partition" was just the free space showing a discrepancy due to him not altering settings to show hidden files and folders.

Doh! Anyway, just as the install was finishing off, it rebooted! I was back to messages about a missing hard drive. Deliberately rebooting, it did it again. The recovery console wouldn't help because it couldn't find the C drive either. Taking the PC home with me after, I changed over the RAM and hooked it up to monitor and keyboard here.

Now it seems to have packed in altogether. I mean it won't even power on. After swapping kettle leads and plugs a million times, I swapped the RAM back over. So it's as dead as a dodo and I've been told Dell made some of their PCs that had that processor in, with custom PSU's. Even if the cause is a faulty PSU, I won't know if the RAM is even OK until I've shelled out for that. I just know it would not be the end of the serious problem I'd been failing to sort out for 3 days - all for a PC designed for somebody else, and my own ready-to-be-passed-on system needing fixing as well. Is there any hope do you think?

Moira I would put my money on the power supply at this point. Does it give any sign of power when you try to turn it on? Fans spin at all, HDD spin up? Anything like that?

No, but it's like Blackpool inside there! There's a winking red light, a green light near the ethernet cable, and the power button flashes pale orange as it does whenever the PC isn't powered on. This is all the time, not just when I press On.

Hmmmm,

It is a coincidence Moira, but I think that the exact same happened to Eileen's Dimension 8100 a few weeks ago.

I wonder if the HDD has "Deskstar" written on it :D

A quick test............... just disconnect the HDD ribbon cable and Molex (power) and see if it will boot from a CD.

Johnno

Why would I need to disconnect the hard drive to boot from a CD? Anyway no, it's as dead as a dodo, appearing to have power getting to the case, but refusing to boot at all.

More research has revealed this to be a well known bug which a lot of Dell users have suffered from, annoyingly choosing to reveal itself in almost all cases just after the 1 year warranty has expired. Just google "orange flashing power button Dell" and you'll see what I mean. More seriously, in hundreds of articles, forum posts, blogs etc, not once is there suggested anything of any real help. Some people claimed to have done weird things which didn't work for me and had no real logic to them, or else dangerously played around with their electricity supply and I wasn't about to try their offered advice.

Like this guy says, "it is basically basically cheaper for me to buy a new computer than it is to try to troubleshoot this one":

http://blog.plaxoed.com/2006/06/26/dell-problems/

It's almost as if this was a manfacturing bug, the sort of thing that happens once every eight years or so, affecting a batch of computers, which if it occurs within the first few months has the company recall them. The fact that these victims were usually out of their warranty period meant it didn't bother Dell at all!

By this time I had tried with a friend of mine, all the solutions we could think of in any case, but if something refuses to power on, your options are limited. This friend of mine brought a definitely working power supply and connected that - no difference. I went through about 15 kettle leads - no difference. I can only be thankful it happened to a PC that had given good service and was about to be given away in any case. Now we can just butcher it and use any handy components - my new rebuild will be happening on Wednesday this week, same friend is coming to help. Can't wait! :D

Hi Moira,

Quote:

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Why would I need to disconnect the hard drive to boot from a CD?

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You don't, it is a truncated form of trouble shooting. Normally you start with the bare minimum until you can get it to boot. In this case it looked like it might be a power or HDD problem. That is why I mentioned Deskstar (or Deathstar as we know them in the trade :D) Quote from Dell certified engineer:

Quote:

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f you’re having HD problems check if the HD is a Maxtor, if so, it’s probably bad. 90% of the replacements I’m given to install are now Western Digital or Seagate. 99% of the ones I’m replacing are Maxtor. If it’s out of waranty and you know the difference between SATA and IDE, you can change it yourself fairly inexpensively.

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The quickest way to stop it drawing power or "muttering darkly" to your other components, is to unplug the two cables.

;)

I think combined with the fact that this PC was just going to be given away, I've now come to the end of what would be the sensible road in terms of spending time on it.