3 Posts
0
1253
E5540 not booting or entering menu
Hello,
I have an e5540 laptop that I got used. It had no hdd when I got it, so I put one in and installed Linux Mint on it. I recently installed a larger hdd in it that had FreeBSD installed, and everything ran fine for a while.
I reformatted the drive to prepare to install something else, but now I can't get the laptop to boot anything, not even getting into the setup menu. I can hit f12 when it starts, and get the message and loading bar, but nothing happens after that.
I've tried removing the battery and holding down the power button, and let it sit for a long time on the loading screen. It seemed to be working fine earlier this morning.
justnobody3345
3 Posts
0
May 25th, 2020 14:00
Ok, I figured out the issue. Seems that if the Dell uefi can't figure out how to boot your system but it seems that it almost should, everything just just freezes instead and you get to take the hdd to another computer with better firmware and format it on that system.
justnobody3345
3 Posts
0
May 25th, 2020 12:00
Ok, so an update:
The machine will let me into the setup menu if the hdd is not installed. I put the hdd back in, and it once again gets stuck and won't let me into the setup menu. The hdd itself appears to be fine, because it works ok in another machine.
I'm not sure what's causing the hangup with this machine when the hdd is in.
Edit: I tried enabling legacy option roms in the setup menu. When I reinstalled the hdd, pressing f12 appears to work at first, then causes the machine to reboot. F2 just freezes up like before.