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Black screen on C640, XP not loading
I'm looking for help with a Dell latitude C640 that I've had for several years. After shutting down for the day at work, I went home and attempted to start-up again. After the Dell splash screen appeared and the BIOS loaded, the screen went black with just a flashing cursor in the upper left. XP will not load. Here are the particulars:
-The C640 has 1 gig ram and a new (6 weeks) 160 GB HDD (20 GB free)
-Win XP pro (I have the disk)
-BIOS A10
I pulled the HDD out and it is accessible through my desktop computer using a USB adapter. The critical data has been copied, but not the apps.
Using the XP CD, I went to the recovery console and tried a few things:
CHKDSK /P: no problems found
FIXBOOT: new sector created, but problem persists
FIXMBR: new boot sector created, but problem persists
I seem to recall a few things from old posts, but can't verify them. One is that large HDD's are a problem with the latitudes or the BIOS version. The other is that a motherboard problem might be the issue.
This laptop does everything I need it to do at a reasonable speed, so I'd like to keep it functioning. Comments and advice appreciated.
ejn63
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July 27th, 2010 06:00
The C-series cannot handle a 160G drive. Replace it with a 120G or smaller drive and you'll be all set.
MFPvet80
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July 27th, 2010 08:00
Thank you for clearing this up. I'll set-up a 100 or 80 GB drive I have around to install in the C640, and put the 160 GB drive in an external caddy for storage. That should solve the problem.
ejn63
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July 27th, 2010 08:00
No BIOS for any of the C-series notebooks supports a drive over 120G. It MAY be possible to get the drive to work - to do so you must create a partition 120G or smaller for Windows as the first partition on the drive. Then you can create a smaller 40G partition for data. Installing Windows on a drive larger than supported by the BIOS may appear to work for a while - until something calls the BIOS to write to the drive and corrupts it. It will appear to be readable on another system that does support INT13 but won't be in a system that doesn't.
Even with the sub-120G partition you're taking a chance - but it should work more reliably than otherwise.
ejn63
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July 27th, 2010 09:00
120G.
MFPvet80
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July 27th, 2010 09:00
Just to close the loop on this topic, what is the maximum hard drive limit for the C series laptops. I have not seen a spec for this. It's important since I own a 640, two 610's and a 600. Great machines.