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12399
September 4th, 2008 16:00
Inspiron 9400 Powers On But Will Not Boot
Hello from Houston :-)
My Inspiron 9400 laptop running XP Home SP2 has essentially been working fine but froze unexpectedly while online yesterday. I held the power button to shut down the machine. Now it will not boot. When I press the power button the machine begins coming on with the center indicator light flashing, but there is no hard drive spin or other sounds and nothing is ever displayed on the screen. I have tried removing the battery and powering on with only the AC adapter. No change. I have removed both AC adapter and battery, held power button for 30 seconds then plugged in AC while still holding the power on button, again with no change. When the power on is pressed I hear the usual faint beep followed by the quick flash across the CD/DVD drive then nothing except the faintest, quick flash on screen while the indicator light flashes that the machine is "working", but the absence of all other sounds seems to indicate no hard drive activity. The center indicator light continues to flash as if the machine is working but nothing else happens, until eventually the laptop is quiet and only the power indicator light is lit. I re-tried all the same troubleshooting after leaving the laptop off overnight to cool down and just sit. No change today.
Before contacting Dell's technical support which will most likely mean shipping the laptop to them for assessment, or heading over to my local Geek Squad, etc. I wondered if perhaps there were any other things I could try myself to potentially address the issue? Perhaps creating some sort of boot disk on another machine to try?
TMcCaine
262 Posts
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September 5th, 2008 14:00
It does sound like you have experienced a hardware failure, but to what extent?First thing to do is to try to get it to post to the initial DELL boot screen and then hop into the BIOS.
Remove every removable component with the exception of the memory modules. If you have two you can try different combinations to determine if one isn't working. I have experienced times where a HDD or CDROM has gone bad and causes the unit to freeze so removing them might allow you to go into the BIOS.
Once you are able to get into the BIOS you can troubleshoot what item caused the problem by putting one piece in at a time. Like placing the HDD in its proper position test & remove, then CDROM, one memory module test in both positions, then the other.
Don't test combinations unless you are able to get into the BIOS and not duplicate the problem in this manner. Once you have duplicated the problem with an item then you can be rather confident that it is the cause and purchase a new one. If you remove every piece you can and it still does not work it will involve more technical knowledge than you may have. Refer to this;
<ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed from this post by Dell>
To see if you are willing to do this kind of work to test and remove individual components. Laptops are delicate and often require specialty tools that you may not have and I don't know your level of expertise. With that said; good luck, and let us know if there is anything else you need help with.
susantexas1
2 Posts
0
September 5th, 2008 20:00
Good suggestions, thank you. Because I didn't feel comfortable doing any sort of disassembly myself, I had the machine assessed by a local PC repair shop which narrowed the problem to (most likely) a failing motherboard. I now await the all too familiar shipping box from Dell to send back the laptop for repair. At least all my data has been recovered, so that's good news :-)
Thanks, again.