Dimenson 3000 Need Help

Could be any number of things. What color are the 4 diagnostic LEDs on rear of the tower when it won't boot? If not all green, look up error codes here.

What peripherals are connected (eg, printer, scanner, etc)?

You can try clearing BIOS:

Power off and unplug

Press/hold power button on tower for ~15 sec

Open the case and remove the motherboard battery

Press/hold power button again for ~30 sec

Reinstall the battery (right-side-up!) - If battery is more than ~2-3 years old, this might be a good time to install a fresh one, CR2032 3-volt lithium ion battery, ~$2-$3 at discount stores.

See if it boots now with only mouse, monitor and keyboard attached.

Ron

Hi Ron,  thanks for your reply.  all the diagnostic lights are green and I did change the battery like you said but it still won't work, do you think the motherboard went bad.

viet

If all 4 LEDs are green and you've cleared BIOS, it sounds like something other than the motherboard is the problem.

Reboot and press F12. If you can get to that menu, choose Utilities partition and run the extended  hard drive tests. This might take a while, so be patient.

Ron

Hi Ron, thx for your reply.  I can't boot in Utilities partition but I do run the IDE diagnotics and 2 hard drive in there are pass ( 1 is primary and the other one is slave just for storage).  Have a good night.

viet

Hi Ron, thx for your reply.  I can't boot in Utilities partition but I do run the IDE diagnotics and 2 hard drive in there are pass ( 1 is primary and the other one is slave just for storage).  Have a good night.

viet

Since the motherboard appears to pass the POST (eg, all 4 LEDs go green), that says -to me- that some other component has a problem.

You may have to strip it down to bare basics. Remove all PCI cards except video card, disconnect power cable to 2nd hard drive, and from optical and floppy drives. Remove all RAM modules except the one in slot 1.

Then remove motherboard battery and press/hold power button for ~30 sec. Reinstall the battery (right-side-up!) and see if it will boot with only mouse, monitor and keyboard. If that works, start adding things back, little by little, to see if you can ID a bum part.  You should do the 'battery thing" each time you add hardware back to force BIOS to recognize that the configuration has changed.

Ron

Hi Ron,  I did strip it down like you said but it still have the same problem .  I want to try to boot from cd but all my data will be gone, you have any suggestion?

Thx you for your help, have a good weekend.

viet.

Dumb question, but did you try booting in safe mode?

Hi , Yes I did but same thing.

I want to try to boot from cd but all my data will be gone, you have any suggestion?

Booting from your Dell Windows Reinstallation CD won't do any harm to your data on either hard drive. If you can boot from the Windows CD, press R at the Welcome screen to launch Recovery Console.

At C:\ prompt, type in:

chkdsk c: /r

Press Enter

Go take a nice long nap while chkdsk attempts to fix errors on the boot hard drive. When it's done, remove the CD and reboot normally -with your fingers crossed!

Ron

Hi Ron, how's your weekend? the problem is I don't have a Dell window reinstallation, what I mean is reinstall window (sorry about that).

thx , viet

The issue is to see if you can boot from something.  Do you have any bootable CD, such as a Dell Resources CD? If the system won't boot from anything then you won't be able to reinstall Windows. But assuming you can boot from a CD, you may be able to repair XP without losing your data.

If you're in the USA, you can request the disks for your system by completing this form. This is a once-only request and Dell may charge you for the disks.

Ron

Thx Ron, let me request cd from dell then see what happen next . Have a good night.

viet.