Hello all,
I am very frustrated with this laptop.. It is a DELL Inspiron B130. Basically, it belongs to a friend so here is the story behind the story per say… This guy had a problem with the original HD and he purchased another with more capacity. Then, he had a friend of his brother who installed the new HD, which by the way is the exact same brand/model that came originally with the laptop. The laptop had windows xp home edition installed originally. The new HD has windows xp pro sp2 installed. He had no problem for a while until one day the computer began booting into the "BSOD". I am trying to do a complete clean install with the windows xp pro sp2 cd that was installed on the new HD but the computer does not want to boot from the DVD/CD drive. I went into the bios and changed it various times using the U,D keys to place the DVD/CD drive in the Boot Sequence section to boot first to no avail… I have tried to boot into Safe Mode and it boots to the "BSOD" as well… Please help and Thank you all in Advanced who can….
If you let it go past the BIOS, then press [F12] this usually opens a one-time boot menu where you can select the device to boot from (for Dells anyway,) what happens ? Can you then select the CD/DVD drive and boot?
Joecastle, before you try booting from CD try reset BIOS to default and see what happens. press and hold alt and F keys or alternately load the defaults under Maintenance menu. dont forget to save changes. i would assume there's nothing wrong with the optical drive sa well.
check BIOS as well if hdd and cd drive is detected.
oh by the way, run the builtin diagnostics to check if there are hardware (esp hdd) failing. while the computer is off press and hold the Fn key and the power button to turn on system. wait till a diagnostics will run. you can use another computer to download the diagnostic software so you can run it. Dell™ Diagnostics Utility
just continue with the test if you receive error codes(error code like 0146 then followed by info of what the error is) but don't forget to take note of them.
Ok, I hit the alt and F key under the Maintenance menu. Then saved changes. I ran the diagnostic utility "Pre-boot System Assessment Build 3019". Everything popped up as passed. At the end a grey box popped up and in it is says the following. "No Diagnostic Utility Partition found. To run diagnostics, insert your Dell "Drivers and Utilities" CD, then select OK to restart the system and boot off CD. I do not have any utility CD's and if I did I still can not boot from cd…
hi.
the pre-boot system assessment is already ok. no need to run the 32 bit diagnostics. the said assessment will already check hardware functionalities as well. if there's problem with the optical drive it would give you error codes like 0147 or 0148, etc. so it seems drive itself is ok.
after you reset BIOS to default, have you checked if you can boot from CD? try changing boot sequence again(make sure it's saved.. sometimes i forget ). system should boot from CD automatically after restarting. is it asking for you to press any key to boot from cd?
if only you have the resource CD then you can also check if it's the CD drive that is not reading the medium or just the OS CD is the the culprit.
can you check if you can boot from the CD using another computer? also, if possible try swapping optical drive to check the drive functionality as well.
Do you have a Windows XP install CD? If you do, you can boot into the Recovery Console from it by entering [R] when directed to. Once you get to the command prompt, [you will need the "administrator" account password [default is blank or no password]
enter this:
"expand D:\i386\pci.sy_ C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\pci.sys" (no quotes, then press [enter]
D: would be your CD/DVD drive letter
C: would be your Windows XP boot drive
Tallon41
I am trying to do a complete clean install with the windows xp pro sp2 cd that was installed on the new HD but the computer does not want to boot from the DVD/CD drive. I went into the bios and changed it various times using the U,D keys to place the DVD/CD drive in the Boot Sequence section to boot first to no avail
I just tried it and I can see the devices. I selected the DVD/CD drive and same thing happens.. Will not boot from DVD/CD drive….
aggk thats right…..unless the Recovery Console is installed as a boot-option, you likely will not be able to get the file off the drive…
wonderful. thinking some more.
Ok…
Just a follow up… I finally got the cd/dvd drive to work.. I opened and closed about ten times and it started working. I guess it will go bad again and probably may have to replace it soon. I think it was just a driver issue that was corrupted and did not want to work… Anyway, I did a complete clean install of Windows Xp Pro and did all the updates. I only need now is protection. Can you all give any thoughts of the best free protection. AV, Firewall, Malware and spyware remover tools with the best settings?
Thank you all again for your help..
). system should boot from CD automatically after restarting. is it asking for you to press any key to boot from cd? 