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Dell Inspiron 5100 Blinking Orange Light + Boot Issues
Hi all. I have an Inspiron 5100 I purchased sometime around August 2003. It's recently started blinking an orange light where the green lights normally are on the front. I believe it's the furthest light on the right. It's green, then will blink 4 orange "flashes", go back to green for a split-second, then blink 4 orange again ... basically 4 orange, green, 4 orange, green - flashing sequence.
I'm not sure what that is and the computer is still running, but it didn't blink orange previously so I'm concerned about it.
Also, I've loaded Linux - Fedora Core 9.3 onto the notebook and that's working and stable - and has been for several months without a problem. Now however, I need to reload Windows onto the box too, and I wanted to set them up in dual-boot, so I was going to reformat my HDD from BIOS and reload Windows on a blank drive, partitioning it for Linux and Windows.
However, after I changed the BIOS to boot from CD with the Windows XP CD that shipped with my notebook I get a blank screen and nothing happens after the "Press any key to boot from CD" message.
If I go into the BIOS to try and reformat my drive from there, I cannot select the HDD and have no option to do a low-level BIOS format. Under the passwords section in BIOS it shows HDD password frozen - or something to that effect. I'm at work now and the notebook is home.
Basically, I have a blinking orange light and I cannot reload windows because I can't get the CD to actually boot into Windows Setup.
Please advise.
Ben589
3 Posts
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August 22nd, 2005 17:00
Ben589
3 Posts
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August 22nd, 2005 17:00
I went home at lunch and checked a couple of things.
The BIOS version is: A06 and the HDD password is not frozen as it did say in the BIOS earlier - it now displays as clear or free ... one of those two.
I also tried a couple more times to reboot the notebook from the Windows XP disk that shipped with it from DELL and after the "Press any key to boot from CD" message, I can see where it's flashing very quickly "Setup is checking your system configuration information" or something like that very quickly - and then the screen goes blank and the whole thing freezes.
This notebook does not have a diskette drive, so I'm not sure how to boot from anything other than HD or CD since I don't have any form of network boot enabled. I was hoping if there was some way I could possibly just "sys" a CD ROM and put a copy of fdisk or something on it it might work, but I can't find any way to sys a CD.
I checked all over the BIOS for a way to reformat the hard drive and can't find one.
bacillus
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August 22nd, 2005 17:00