Vista - will post but then freeze up
I have a Dell Studio 17 laptop running (or not running, I should say) Windows Vista. The laptop will post and I can get the Setup and Boot menus, but it will not run diagnostics or start from a disk. It simply hangs with a blank screen after the Dell logo disappears. I can hear the drive whirring.
Dell support has been uneven - I've been told it is a hardware problem by one person and a software problem by another; a computer geek acquaintance thinks it's a faulty BIOS. I am at my wits' end!
Dell support has been uneven - I've been told it is a hardware problem by one person and a software problem by another; a computer geek acquaintance thinks it's a faulty BIOS. I am at my wits' end!
Computers & Internet - Dell - Studio - Studio 17 Laptop
Answers & Comments
Do you see the hard drive listed in the BIOS?
If not, probably a hard drive issue - but strange you can't boot from a CD.
Did you reset the BIOS to defaults? If it is a BIOS issue, you could try and flash it to a newer one (if it exists) but if it goes wrong you could brick your computer.
I had a failing hard drive in a laptop which would not boot up. I bought one of those converter things (laptop IDE to full IDE) so I could hook it up to my desktop pc as a slave. I was able to access all the data and transfer it to the new hard drive in the laptop. If you have a SATA connection on the laptop hard drive and your other computer then I don't think an adapter would be needed.