Dell Inspiron 1545 won't boot from optical drive

Hello, my first time here. A friend has asked me to look at her Dell 1545. It has Win7 on it. The BIOS diagnostics show a problem with the hard drive and the boot process shows no boot sector. I've tried to get it to boot from the internal optical drive, an external USB optical drive, a USB stick - nada. I've restored settings to default, tried the F6/F8 keys on boot - it won't acknowledge the optical drive (or anything else, for that matter), despite the diagnostics finding and okaying its presence. Safe mode, Last Known Good, etc., nothing. The closest I can get is for it to boot to a Win7 bluebird of happiness screen (I assume that's a bluebird). but after that, nothing happens. Side note - the only light I see on the thing is a power light on the front - not disk activity light flashing or anything else. ??? All suggestions accepted - she doesn't care about the content on the hard drive and I'm going to flatten it and install openSuSE 12.3, anyway. Cheers!! Michael

Hi Michael, Welcome to the WTT forums… 1 Have you tried tapping F8 once per second immediately after pressing the power on button from a cold start and seeing if the advanced menu comes up? 2 You could pull out the drive (take all personal safety and ESD precautions) and use a known good working machine to have a look at the hard drive and perhaps run chkdsk /r on it or your favourite utility… 3 I take it you have tried to boot to a live distro of Linux…(Puppy is good for this) any joy? 4 If you have a spare compatible hard drive handy then stick it in and see if there is any chance of booting up via a CD or USB (as you have tried before) 5 Can you get it to boot to DOS? Post back and let us know how you get on? Regards paws

Hi paws, Thanks for that. I've tried F8 and the Advanced Boot Menu - no joy on anything there. Safe Mode does show me a quick flash of BSOD (not long enough to get numbers), then dumps me back to the no boot sector found msg. The CD/DVD drive doesn't respond under any circumstances, so a boot from there has been impossible. Bottom line - no boot possible to run any sort of software - bummer. I think it's come down to hardware and I'll have to start looking at the parts inside. Not my fave thing with laptops - small parts all over the kitchen table. And a small kitchen table. Maybe a connector has come loose and fixing that will solve all my problems. Right. Cheers! Michael