Inspiron 1100 will not boot

I would like you to try a POWER DRAIN .....

Remove the battery from your laptop,disconnect the AC adapter from your laptop and make sure no external device is connected to your laptop.

Now after disconnecting everything from your laptop press the power button for 20 to 30 seconds.

Completing this reconnect your battery and AC adapter and try to turn on your laptop.

When you try to turn on your laptop your LED's will be flashing...say for example there will be three LED's if the first one is steady on,the next one is blinking and the third light is off,it means and error code or LED code meaning some hardware might went wrong.If possible try to observe what it displays...or be more specific!

what exactly happens when u turn on?

I removed the battery and AC and with no external connections I pressed and held the On button for 30 sec.  I put the battery in and reconnected the AC power.  When I press the On button I get a dell Logo and the BIOS loads BIOS Revision A32.  The screen then goes dark with just a blinking _ and the OS does not load.  Below the touchpad, the left hand green light is on solid.  The middle light blinks three times while the BIOS is loading and then goes dark.  The right hand light blinks amber three times and then blinks green, repeatedly.  To the right of the start button, there are three lights.  The left hand light is solid green.

I have reseated the hard drive and the memory.  I have run multiple diagnostics tests from the diagnostics CD and the CPU disk and memory Pass. 

since u tried diagnostic step from ur cd i want u to run another test

So did u try to run a PSA test?(the test i mentioned)

If not turn off ur laptop and press the FN key and Power button in ur laptop at the same instance...it will take through some step first it will test ur LCD if it says no error and allow the test to run completely.If this test is passed i want u to restart ur comp and get in to advanced boot options and enter safe mode .To do this tap F12 when u restart ur comp and see the dell logo...a black window will open.If u are successful in entering the safemode then the problem is with ur video driver i want u to go to device manager and uninstall display adapter driver and reinstall it. To enter device manager type  devmgmt.msc in Run and hit enter.If u need to download ur video driver enter safe mode with networking (u can find it below safe mode in adv boot options).

Run Dell Diags on the hard drive and run the long version.

I have exactly same problem with my inspirion 1100 laptop XP home. All of a suddent it stopped to boot OS start of Nov I hope it has nothing to do with any windows update or my mcafee AV update. laptop lights will behave as normal, go thru BIOS/POST and then simply stop at blank screen with blinking cursor and HD led not blinking. No led / display error msgs, No window logo. No safe mode option comes up.

 Laptop will pass all diagnostic tests. Hard disk was removed and tested with usb adapter to other machine. Had some errors but all cleared, MBR checked OK, partition tables OK, tried fixboot, fixmbr, tried recovery console, tried repair install. Harddisk looks OK can read everything. It is just laptop will not boot and always behaves in same manner.

BTW I can always boot laptop from CD drive..

"Had some errors but all cleared,"

Exactly what errors?

Have you tried a new hard drive and a clean Windows install thereafter?

>>"Had some errors but all cleared,"

I think chkdsk /f report said there were some errors  and it fixed I mean what ever this command is supposed to do. I have not tried a clean install for obvious reasons as there is lot to back up. I found a spare harddisk and I will try clean install with this harddisk.

 It is quite likely that mother board has developed fault. If this is the reason THEN.

The frustrating part is DELL diagnostics turned out to be useless and wasteful exercise. Also itr is strange that I can boot I mean run recovery console from CD drive and do repair install. I also notice after repair install or running diagnostics in some situations system is supposed to re-boot by itself but machine will not shut down by itself to continue with re-boot.

Let us say if clean install works ( which by the way is not some kind of fix but just like do it all over again) Why does a clean install do that everything I tried won't do???

Nd if clean install also doesn't work what else can I try ....I am an expert hardware engg I can do any changes if solution is known but can't spend time in troubleshooting as it is not worth my time. So pls help me if you know this is a known systematic/ ageing fault...

Ok folks...i ll give u a tip

1. Instead of trying the diagnostics step go for PSA test..(check my above post),its a built in test so always go for this test instead of that diagnostic test which is also time consuming.
2. Tomsan in ur above post u also mentioned u were able to see ur cursor blinking,so their are also chances for a video related issue.
3. so do a  PSA test and tell us the results of what u see?

More... I reinstalled XP without formatting the drive.  When the installation completed and the system attempted to boot, it again stopped on the blank screen with the flashing cursur.  Tried Safe Mode again with the same results.

vignesh_r,

I have run the PSA test and all test results were Pass.  I am unable to start the laptop in safe mode.  I tap the F8 key after pressing the on button and the laptop goes to the blank screen with the blinking cursur just like when I try to start normally.

I borrowed a copy of a Winternals boot CD and was able to boot off of the CD and copy off the files I needed.  Strange thing is that it booted fine on Thursday night when I first tried but today it took about 12 tries before Winternals would boot.  During that time the 1100 was stored and disconnected from a power source.

bump

If the system POSTs correctly, you've much more likely a bad hard drive than anything else.  Did you run an EXTENDED (2 hour+) diagnostic, or just the quick one?

At that, not all diagnostics will catch all possible hard drive errors.

Should I reformat the drive and reload the OS? 

What doesn't make sense is the fact that the PC will not boot reliably every time with either the reinstall cd or with the Winternals CD.  With both CDs, many times the PC would start to boot and then stop with the blank screen and the blinking cursor.

I ran both the short test and using the diagnostics CD ran a disk test that went almost 2 hours.  The results of both test was PASS.