Dell Vostro 410 Stuck on BIOS 1.0.3 Screen Please help.

hi... same thing just happened to my Vostro 410 so this seems more than just a coincidence... your fix worked for me too but it really doesn't make much sense

Nice to see that Dell care enough to not reply to your problem within 7 months...

Nice work Dell, brilliant customer service

First, this is user to user forum, not a user to Dell forum.

Second, what was done before the startup issue occured? Was the bios updated? Was hardware added?

hi chris, my apologies - thought this was a support forum! 

i did nothing before this happened this morning. When i tried the fix that worked for the other user it started fine and since has restarted twice fine. I am now in the middle of an extended dell diagnostics hardware test

Regards,

Justin 

are there any other hardware check that I can do? The extended test passed ok

my machine has gone again yesterday and is perminently stuck on the Dell boot/bios screen.

I have unplugged everything and unfortunately nothing seems to be helping

Has anyone else got any pearls of wisdom please?

Cheers,

Justin

Broken shorted USB ports on the front panel or elsewhere can cause an issue.

Bad or Dying hard drive can cause freeze up.

Clear the CMOS and see if that helps.

Disconnect the data line from the hard drive?

Does it get past the freeze and say no boot devices?

Incompatable USB hub, printer, Mouse or other faulty USB device can casue boot freeze.

Keyboard should go into the usb ports close to the Network input

Thanks for the reply...

i seemed to have found what the potential cause is anyway...

I opened up the machine, disconnected the hard drive and the cd drive then tried starting it and it worked fine...

I then plugged the hard drive back in and it started fine. However after that I plugged the cd drive back in and it also worked first time too.

So I think the problem lies with either the HD or CD drive....

At least this gives other users something else to try if they experience the same issue!

wow...im having this exact same problem! my vostro 410  is freezing at the same screen.  i just assumed it was due to me dual booting linux. yesterday after i installed linux and played around a bit, i restarted and tried to boot back into windows 7. it wouldnt boot, i cant remember the error it gave, so i repaired my startup with a system repair disk, restarted and it worked just fine. this was last night and i havent restarted until 30 mins ago...and now i cant get past the dell screen. has anyone  found the cause/solution?

no one seems to know what the cause of this is really but the fact that it keeps happening to a lot of Vostro 410s seems to allude to the fact that there is a inherent hardware issue somewhere... 

Obviously Dell will never admit this out in the open though :)

So... to get your machine started read the above posts but essentially it'll either be by starting with the keyboard out or you might have to go as far as opening the machine up and disconnecting the hard drive which i had to do last time!

Hopefully you'll have to do this once - for me at least it seems that once you do get it started - it'll be fine for a long while! 

Weird...

Thank you all

I have had the same problem, found this forum, unplugged the keyboard and hit F1 when it recognised keyboard was missing.

Was just about to call in the expensive PC repair man !!!

Same problem occurred for me when I accidentally left a USB drive plugged into the front USB port, powered off, and back on.

I unplugging the keyboard to force the keyboard fault error as described, and that fixed my issue too.