Help please!

Question

Dear Dell community people,

I have a rather serious problem now and I'd ask for you help. Here is what happened:

I decided to reinstall my XP home on my Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop.

Put the CD in, formatted and installed without any problem. After XP began running I decided to install MediaDirect too from the CD came with the laptop. Then I realised that it has to be installed before the XP...

So I said, okay delete and make your things, then I install XP again, I have time... MD said it was time to change the CD to XP and install it. Changed and rebooted, but it just gave strange sounds, doing nothing. A rhythmic buzz was all the CD driver gave. I had the idea, that it might be because of the wrong order of installation. Got the HDD out, put into a PC and formatted it. Put it back to the laptop and the answer whatever CD I tried to use - missing NTLDR.

HDD out, using EUSEUS partition manager I found 2 gigs of MD on the HDD. Deleted that and formatted the hard disk again, making everything to plain as new (I suppose).

Tried again - nothing, but missing NTLDR.

Got the HDD out, into the PC and began to install XP on that hard disc. When finished copying the main files and restarted I got the HDD back to the laptop. Result - nice blue screen saying the problem may be because of a newly installed hard drive.

Tried booting from the CD - the strange rhythmic buzzing sound. Tried booting from USB and updating the BIOS - no result. BIOS recognises the DVD drive and the HDD. Checked the HDD in the PC - 100% error free. Checked the XP CD - 100% working.

The MD disc made something bad?? For me it seems from the strange sound the CD gives, that it is not reading, just running around sometimes. May the DVD drive crashed after the MD install? I've found some people having similar problems, but not the same... Could you please advise me something new? I don't want MD anymore just want to get my laptop with XP back.

Thank you!

Balázs

RoHe · Accepted Answer

Regardless of what's on the hard drive, the system should still boot from an optical drive, assuming you insert a bootable CD or DVD.

Insert a bootable CD in the drive and reboot. Quickly press F12 and select "Boot from CD" from the menu. The CD should load all the drivers needed to run the optical drive.

If it won't boot from the optical drive, that suggests the drive (conincidentally) may have died. You might consider following the instructions here to remove and then reinstall the optical drive in case it got jarred and is not making connections with the motherboard.

Is it possible you caused some damage when you removed the hard drive which affected the motherboard and/or optical drive?

The 66 MB on the hard drive are probably the Dell Diagnostics utilities. You can try booting from the hard drive, quickly press F12 and select "Diagnostics" (or similar) from the menu. You will need a data disk in the optical drive before you start the diagnostics in order to test that drive. Without a data disk, the optical drive will fail the diagnostics, even if it's perfectly ok.

Ron

RoHe · Answer

When you got the missing NTLDR message, are you sure it was actually booting from the CD and not from the hard drive?

Is it possble your optical drive died? Can you boot from the Dell Diagnostics CD?

Ron

BalazsK · Answer

Well, actually that's my question too - is it possible that my DVD drive died?

Mechanically dead would be very strange as I was able to use it without any problem while installing XP. I installed MD and right after that it did not accept XP CD and right after formatting the HDD it did not accept either the XP CD nor the MD CD. So my idea is that hardware-wise it works, just maybe the optical drive's driver is missing? Is it possible? I heard about some laptops having the whole BIOS on the HDD. If it's the same for me, then I may have deleted the driver too?

I haven't tried the Dell Diagnostics CD because I'm sure the computer is not booting from the CD at all, it doesn't give the typical reading the optical disc sound. But as there is the very first part of the XP installed on the HDD now, it should recognise it and do something, shouldn't it? It suggest to me that although the BIOS says that the HDD and the optical drive are recognised, they are not??

Balázs

BalazsK · Answer

The HDD had about 66 MByte of used space but it had no files at all. Even the EUSEUS saw nothing from this 66 MByte.

I've just done a research - does this symptom mean that the Master Boot Record has problems? Can this cause the problem? Any solutions?

Balázs

BalazsK · Answer

Thank you for all your answer, Ron!

The diagnostics said "error code 2000-0148" for the optical drive meaning it is faulty. Took the laptop to an IT shop nearby and the guy after checking the same things (BIOS, diagnostics, optical drive etc.) said the same - the optical drive died. It was something like 4 years old so it served well.

Dell's Toshiba Optical Drive R.I.P. (2006-2010)

Now trying to install Win7 from a USB.

Question is answered, problem is solved. Thank you Ron!

Balázs

RoHe · Answer

Sorry about the optical drive, but glad I could help. Hope the Win 7 install goes without problem! Ron

Windows General

Help please!

Was this post helpful?