front green light is fade - Dimension 2400 starts up to Window wp logo displays, and then black screen

Your English is fine.

What color are the diagnostic LEDs on the rear of the tower? If not all green, look up the error codes here. (Sorry, the link to the manual in French, goes to the English version.)

Have you added any new hardware recently?

Could be symptoms of a failing power supply... Disconnect the PC from the mains and then move the voltage selector slide switch on rear of the tower back and forth a few times. Make sure it's correctly set to 220V before you reconnect the PC to the mains. :emotion-5:

Ron

EDIT: Have you tried a different wall outlet? If you use a surge protector, power strip, or uninterruptable power supply. Remove those and connect the PC directly to the mains.

Dear Ron,

Thank you for your kind reply.

1- All the four diagnostic LEDs on the rear are green.

2- I cannot see any way to move the voltage selector.Is there a special way to move it ?

It is currently set to 230 volts.

3- On the Dimension 2400 manual, I could read that the green light (which is on the left side od the power button) could be "amber". But my green lignt is neither amber (as far as I understand the "amber" word in English, as the colour of the natural amber found in the baltic see) nor fully green.

The color is light  green, especially if(document.getElementById('gdst')){document.write('

I just assumed there would be a slide selector for voltage on the rear of the tower. Maybe the version sold outside the US doesn't have that option.

Amber can also mean yellow.

It could be coincidental that the power LED isn't the right color green. Maybe the LED is just getting old and faded? Never heard anyone else say the power button wasn't the right green. I believe there are both green and amber LEDs inside that button, so maybe they're both lighting up, making the color less green? But that's also something I've never heard before.

Did you run the tests on RAM, video card etc from the F12 menu?

Instead of Safe Mode, try "Last known good" on the F8 menu.

Does this system have an add-in PCI video card or on-board video? If you have an add-in video card, try reseating it in the slot. Be sure to power off and unplug the PC first.

Ron

I queried some of the experts, and it has been suggested that perhaps your power button is failing and needs to be replaced. You'd have to contact Dell Spare Parts in your part of the world to see if a replacement power button is available.

Ron

Dear Ron,

Thank you again for your help.

1- Do you think that if the power button was defect, I could reach the Windows xp logo screen ?

2- I tried to repair windows xp from the cd, but after the repairing process nothing changed :

I still reach the windows logo screen, and then I get a black screen (just with the mouse cursor on it, which can move)

3- Do you think that if the power supply was partly defect, that could lead to this impossibility of fully starting windows xp ?

Thank you again in advance,

Patrick

Defective power button might explain the color of the light.

You may need to strip the system down to its bare essentials. Disconnect PC from the mains and press/hold power button for ~15 sec. Disconnect all peripherals.

Open the case and remove all PCI cards, except video card (if you have add-in video card), carefully reseat RAM modules in their slots, disconnect all drives (floppy and optical) except hard drive, etc. Then remove the battery from the motherboard and press/hold the power button on the tower for ~30 sec. Reinstall the battery (right-side-up!) and try to boot with only mouse, monitor and keyboard connected.

Ron

Dear Ron,

I just wanted to add something to my previous today post :

When the system is blocked on the balck screen, the other green light, located on the right side of the power button, remains also light green.

As far as I understood, this right green light is related to the running of the hard disk.

I do not whether or not, this piece of information can help to the understanding of the problem.

Kind Regards,

Patrick

Patrick,

If I understand correctly, you stripped the system down to bare essentials but the problem doesn't change.

Have you tried booting from your XP CD? Put the XP CD in the drive and close the drawer. Reboot and press F12 before XP starts to load. Choose "boot from CD" from the list.

If that works, press R at first screen to launch Recovery Console.

At C: prompt, type in:

chkdsk c: /p /r

Press Enter

Now take a nice nap.

When it's done, remove the XP CD and reboot.

Ron

Dear Ron,

Thank you again.

1- Yes, I did follow the procedure you gave me, in order to strip down the system to bare essentials.

The problem remains the same.

2- Yesterday, I also tried to boot from the CD.

I pressed F12 and choosed boot from the CD. when pressing R at first screen, nothing happened.

So, I entered the setup to set the parameters to boot on the CD first. Then after pressing F12, at the first screen, I pressed R. But this, as I found on the Internet, does not lead to the possibility to repair windows. So, I selected the re-installation of windows, and on a next screen, I could press R to repair windows.

This procedure worked, but the problem (of getting a black screen after the windows logo screen) remains.

3- I will try tomorrow, at my office, to do what you said : at C: prompt, type in: chkdsk c: /p /r

4- Do you think that if the power supply was partly defective, that could lead to this impossibility of fully starting windows xp ?

 In other words, is it possible that a power supply delivers not enough voltage or current or energy ?

And, does the windows xp starting need more energy that just starting the Bios and Dos ?

 Thank you again in advance,

Patrick

Additional thoughts:

If you don't see the Welcome to Setup screen, then the system probably isn't booting from the XP CD. So make sure you saved the change to the boot sequence in BIOS before you exited setup.

Ron

Patrick,

If all the diagnostic LEDs are green, that suggests everything is powering up correctly.

So you can see the BIOS screens when you enter setup and change the boot sequence?

Did you actually see the "Welcome to Setup" screen when you booted from the XP CD? You should be able to press R (or lower case r) on that screen to enter Recovery Console. Read  How to use the Recovery Console. You can't run chkdsk unless you can get to the C: prompt.

You selected Reinstallation and pressed R on next screen for a repair. Is that when screen went black again?

Ron

Dear Ron,

I am now facing a new problem, since I removed and put again the battery.

When I press F2, to reach the setup, I can see two amendments :

- the date has moved to 2003 (OK, no problem, I corrected the date and time)

- but, in the boot sequence menu, the CD-ROM is now mentioned as "cd rom device not installed"

So, I cannot boot from a CD any longer.

So, what can I do to boot from a CD again ?

Thank you again,

Patrick

Removing the battery resets the BIOS to factory defaults so that's why the date/time changed. So you at least you know that BIOS was reset. :emotion-5:

Look in BIOS setup to see the status of Drives 1 through 3 which "Identifies the drives attached to the SATA or PRI IDE connectors on the system board, and lists the capacity for hard drives."

If the CD drive isn't listed there, power off and unplug the system from the mains. Make sure the power and data cables were correctly and securely reconnected to the CD drive. I assume this is an IDE CD drive. There should be a red stripe on the flat ribbon cable on the same side as pin 1 on the connector, so make sure that  the stripe is correctly aligned with pin 1 on the drive. If this is the only drive on that IDE ribbon cable, it should be connected to the end of the cable, not to the middle connector on the ribbon.

Check the CD drive's data cable connection to the motherboard too.

Ron

Dear Ron,

I finally managed to solve all my problems.

1- In order to be able to boot on the CD, I did the following :
- I took the battery off
- I waited for one hour before put the battery again in place
- Then, when powering the computer, I was automatically asked to set the date and time in the setup.
- After doing it, I could see that the CD driver had been re-installed.

2 So, I could re-install windows xp from the installation windows xp CD.
Thus, the computer worked.

3- The computer is a part of a 3-computer network.
And unfortunately, the repaired computer could not access the network.
After some time to search for the related reasons, I realized that the re-installed windows xp version was the SP1.
On the two other computers, the windows xp version was, of course, sp3.
So, I upgraded sp1 to sp3.
And, at last, the repaired computer could access the network.

I wanted to thank you very much for the time you spent to help me an for every piece of information you gave me.

Kind Regards,

Patrick