Startup problem on cleaned latitude

Question

I have a Latitude 5480 that was gifted to me by a past employer. I somehow got it cleaned, even to the BIOS level, but it seems to have trouble starting up. The picture below is what I get. When I proceed beyond this I get the spinning wheel and "Just a moment" for maybe 5 minutes. Then it shuts down, restarts and does the same thing. I have have shut it down by pressing the power button for 10 seconds quite a few times, and one time it landed on a screen that looked promising. It was a desktop with nothing loaded except Cortana and an icon of the trash can. There were no apps at all. After a minutes or so it shut down. I restarted and it did the same as per pictures. I have pressed F12 during startup with no success. I removed the battery and held the off button for 30 seconds and returned the battery. When I did this I did a screen asking if I wanted BIOS or EUFI startup. I clicked in EUFI but it went nowhere. Any ideas. I am a novice at this but would love to get this little laptop going for personal use.

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NJDave · Answer

Good first steps to get you started off right:

Replacing the CR2032 CMOS button cell battery. It''s cheap and easy to find (e.g. at Walmart), and good to eliminate as a potential problem.
Restoring the BIOS to factory settings.

After that, the instructions on either of the below pages can help you restore your system to factory state or better:

If you have access to another (networked) Windows system and a USB stick: How to Download and Use the Dell Operating System Recovery Image
This may work if you don't have access to another system, but you do have network access: Restore your Computer Using SupportAssist OS Recovery

You can also create and install from generic Windows installation media, but more steps may be involved to find and install all the drivers. The Dell utilities above should install all the necessary drivers.

Latitude

Startup problem on cleaned latitude

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