Blue screen of death on Dimension 4600 -- will not load Windows XP CD

You may be looking at a harddrive failure, or simply an issue with the boot configuration.

 

Have you changed the BIOS to try and boot from CD first, or use F12 during POST to get the onetime boot menu?

 

also see the bluescreen troubleshooting article (it does give suggestions for your situation), if you have Windows media center edition, you may have to disable the CD drive in the BIOS to boot from the Media Center DVD

 

Hope this helps

I have gotten into the BIOS and F12 menus, but I haven't been able to find clear instructions of what to do there and didn't want to make things worse by changing something I shouldn't. Do you mind letting me know or pointing me to an article that makes it clear exactly what setting to change?

 

Thanks for the article. I will scope it out now to see if any of its suggestions help.

 

Thanks for your help,

~Amy

liquidmotioninc

Before trying to load XP, run Dell diagnostic's extended test, read, write, verify, on the hard drive.

How to use Dell's Diagnostic Utility

Diagnostics can also, be run from the Drivers and Utilities Resource CD, see here

More information about resolving the 'UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME' error message, is here

Bev.


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Please don't send me questions about your system by DCF Messenger.
Post the issue in the appropriate Board, where they will be answered.

Diagnostic test is being run as I type.

 

I went into the start-up menu and had it always try to boot only from the CD, but this failed--it tried, said it could not boot, and asked me if I wanted to retry or return to startup. Retry failed. I returned to startup, activated the other options (although moved CD-ROM to the top of the list) and then went to F12 to run diagnostic testing. That now seems to be finding a bunch of data errors--eek.

 

I will report once its finished.

I was browsing around on this computer, turned back to the broken one, only to find it had completed the diagnostic test (I assume) and returned to the Main Menu. There are no results or anything. What am I supposed to do now?

CD may be bad, what version of XP is it,

 

XP Home, Professional, media center Edition?

Diagnostic told me there was no or blank media in the IE CD-ROM device. The unhelpful XP CD is still in there. I am (not) shocked.

 

Although I just put the diagnostic tools CD in there, hit retry, and the test seemed to continue.

 

Either my CD-ROM drives are useless, or the never before opened XP CD is, it seems?

XP Home Edition, including service pack 1

 

The laptop I'm currrently on has a similar installation disk--XP home with service pack 1, although because its a compaq the outside of the disk looked different. I only tried in one of the drives, but it didn't recognize it either.

 

I really think the computer is unable to recognize the CD drives.

Disable the top drive in the (BIOS) and then try it in the second drive, It will only try to boot from the first drive it sees.

It's been a long, frustrating day...

 

Created boot floppy disks on my brother's old computer, a tedious, buggy process. Tried to boot from them on the broken computer--worked until I got to disk two and I got an error about some file not loading. Frustrated beyond reckoning but pleased that I'd figured out how to change boot order, I stuck my XP disk from this laptop back in, tried it in both drives, and finally got the computer to load the XP Recovery Panel. (Maybe Dell did send me a faulty CD--it case had been sealed until this afternoon). Ran chkdsk, only to have it stop partway through and tell me my volume had one or more unrecoverable problems. So I'm guessing it's a hard drive crash afterall and there's nothing I can do?

 

I suppose I'll have to go to a computer repair store tomorrow, see if they can save any of my data and/or put in a new harddrive or something. Bugger.

 

Thanks for all the advice, everyone!

~Amy

if checkdisk does not complete, you will have to back up the data as you say.

 

You could probably do it yourself with new disks, you can request backup copies online

 

The good news is, if chkdsk did run a while, it means the drive is spinning and mostly readable, your data is probably fine.

 

Good Luck Amy

Checkdisk made it to about 73%, I think, and then jumped back to 50% and went on for awhile before aborting. It's good to hear some of the data may still be recoverable. From what I've read today, I gather the best way to back up stuff is to get ahold of an external hard drive and making the broken one slave to it? There isn't a huge amount of stuff, size-wise, but it would save me an extraordinary amount of time tediously reentering data if I could recover the files.

 

I do have all the software backup disks from Dell.

 

Thanks again,

~Amy

What I would do:

 

1. remove the old drive
2. put new drive on the cables from the old drive (IDE drive according to manual)
3. install windows on the new drive and install drivers in the correct order
4. connect the old drive to another harddrive cable
5. enable the IDE port the old drive is now connected to if necessary
6. when windows starts it may want to run chkdsk, just cancel it
7. you will see the old drive in My Computer
8. copy the data from the old drive to the new drive

 

hope this helps