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View Full Version : PC issues, me asking, who'd have thought!!!



goughy
14th December 2014, 10:51 AM
OK, having issues with Rob's dell xps desktop. Trying to suss out what it is and I'm a bit lost.

What is happening is it's getting to the Dell splash screen, freezing there with the progress bar 90% through for 5 minutes (timed it) , then it continues on. If I press nothing it goes to a blank screen with a little '_' cursor flashing. If I press the F2 or F12 buttons it will eventually go into cmos or into the boot menu. In cmos all ram and disks are present. If you exit you end up at the blank screen. Through F12 I've tried to boot to the disk drive instead of hdd but it still goes to blank screen. I've done the full Dell boot up test option available in the boot options and that passed.

I've removed all the ram and tried them one by one, also inserting them through each of the 6 ram slots. The ram slots have 3 coloured blue and three coloured red. When a stick is in the blue ram slots it boots as I've described. When a stick is in one of the red ram slots the pc continues to beep twice, and nothing happens on the screen. The monitor actually goes into power down mode like it's receiving no signal (cause it's probably receiving no signal. If I have one stick of ram in each a red and blue slot then there are no beeps and it goes to splash screen and freezes. If I have all the ram in (2 x 8g in blue and 3 x 4g in red) it boots, freezes, then if I eventually get it into cmos the ram shows as 24gig (while it had 28gig in there, found out after buying ram that motherboard only accepts 24gig max).

All the drives power up. I've also disconnected all the drives one at a time and all of them and still the same. The only peripheral card in there is the video card.

I have no idea what the problem could be. We're assuming motherboard, but really don't know and have no idea ourselves how else to test it. Don't suppose anyone else has any clues?

mike
14th December 2014, 11:14 AM
Nope.

talbo
14th December 2014, 12:33 PM
So it's not booting to the OS at all? Gave you reset CMOS to default?

goughy
14th December 2014, 02:00 PM
Don't even know what that is. And no, it's like it's not even trying to boot into the OS.

markTHEblake
14th December 2014, 04:07 PM
very unlikely to be hardware.

get a LIVE install disc (any Ubuntu will do, or Hirens BootC) and boot it up, if you get a running desktop then you have virtually proved there is an issue with your operating system. Then do reinstall windows using the "in place upgrade" method

Daves
14th December 2014, 04:15 PM
Sounds like your auto exec has got corrupted/jumbled and it can't find the start up directory. I had a similar problem with my last PC. You need to reset the start up drive in the bios setup. I forget the menu options?, F8? gets you there I think?

goughy
14th December 2014, 05:33 PM
I'll give both a try. But will the live disk thing work, or resetting the startup disk work, if it freezes before it even goes looking for a disk. At the moment, I can't get it to boot from cd/dvd drive with the windows recovery disk because it freezes before it even tries. I don't get to the point of any error messages. Just nothing happens.

BenM
14th December 2014, 05:37 PM
No autoexec on Win 7 - it has a bcd which is a bit different. But if it's freezing at POST that needs to be fixed first. I'd be pulling the BIOS battery out to reset it (or using jumpers if the board had them). If you can get it booting do a BIOS update to hopefully stop it happening again.

goughy
14th December 2014, 06:19 PM
And just for fun, had the usb configured, rebooted it, plugged in the usb and then it went from the splash screen very fast and was acting normal, so I let it boot from the hdd. But after 10 secs of the windows splash screen the screen went blank, the monitor went into power down mode and nothing. Rebooted again and am booting from the windows dvd this time to see what happens and if I can recover from there. These two times are the fist times in maybe 20+ boots that I've gotten to this point. I'd done nothing different other than plug in the ubuntu disk to see if it would boot from there. Couldn't boot from the dvd in the past either.

mike
14th December 2014, 06:26 PM
very unlikely to be hardware.get a LIVE install disc (any Ubuntu will do, or Hirens BootC) and boot it up, if you get a running desktop then you have virtually proved there is an issue with your operating system. Then do reinstall windows using the "in place upgrade" method this

goughy
14th December 2014, 09:13 PM
Yeah, think that'll be the next thing to do.

It's been pretty whack. Originally couldn't get anything to work - could boot from any device (usb, dvd, hdd) for the last day. Then a couple of hours ago the splash screen zipped through quick as normal and I could boot from the windows dvd. Started to repair, then it wanted to do a restore from an earlier point and it went through that, then it ended up in a blank screen just like before. Nuthing. Tried that twice. Then just before heading out to the street party I made the ubuntu usb and booted from that and it came up fine. I left for the party, and have just gotten back 2 hours later and it's still in ubuntu. So I guess I'll have to try installing windows again.

The main reason for my confusion on what's going wrong was firstly, the long freeze during the post screen. I thought this would be before any os or hdd's were doing anything. And then the immediate freeze after it, where nothing, dvd drive, usb drive, nothing was working. Then for some of it to start working again...... Still a bit worried that something funky is going on in there. At least if we end up wiping her main drive, all her data is kept on a separate drive which I'll unplug so there's no way I can stuff it up. Granted she does have a tonne of software to reinstall.

goughy
14th December 2014, 09:14 PM
And still thinking of rebooting the bios just for the sake of it!