Missing operating system fault after some severe video issues

Question

I have a Studio XPS 435MT running windows Vista 64 bit and had been having intermittent video problems for a few months. More of a mild irritant than anything too serious - some artifacting (is that the right word?) but driver updates and swapping the lead from the monitor from one of the inputs on the back of the video card to the other seemed to deal with it. I know that was probably more of a blind guess than a rational action however I'm none too technical.

However it all went a bit chaotic a few days ago. Started to get really severe artifacting - horizontal lines, screen freezes etc when booting into windows, screen elements leaving 'echoes' when I moved them around etc - and also screen corruption on the pre-windows start up screen. Lot's of video card errors as well - a almost constant message saying the video driver had stopped responding.

I tried reinstalling the drivers from the Dell website but this didn't seem to make much difference. The machine was pretty much unusable. So hoping that the problem might be software rather than a dying video card I did a full reinstall back to the original factory settings. Didn't really work as I still got artifacts on start up plus freezes. After several attempts finally got the machine running and did the windows updates thing. Rebooted and now all I get is a message before the machine goes into Windows saying 'Missing Operating System'.

So, is it the video card or the hard drive or both? Really unsure what is going on here but as I said I'm none too technical when it comes to these things.

Also, sods law being what it is, my warranty ran out a couple of months ago. Does it sound rescuable and if so will it be cost effective to do so?

Any advice would be very welcome!

nodylpm · Accepted Answer

Problem seems to be solved.

Seems the primary hard drive had failed. Had a very slow realisation that as the machine had two hard drives why not set hdd1 as hhd0 and do a clean reinstall. Probably an obvious thing to most but as I said I'm none too technical.

Booted the OS fine but still a few graphics glitches. Swapped the adaptor that interfaces between the video card and the monitor for a new one as I noticed what looked suspiciously like one of the connector pins from the adaptor lying on the floor behind the computer and all seems absolutely fine. No crashes on bootup, clear screen and 3d graphics run fine.

So, fix the boot problem first worked. Thanks for the advice.

xcator · Answer

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/startup-repair-frequently-asked-questions need to fix boot problem first then video corruption problem...

osprey4 · Answer

Hi Nodylpm, Try running the Dell diagnostics on your video card. It sure sounds to me based on what you've described that you have a hardware issue of some sort.

xcator · Answer

hum, well, need to ask first if you have any usb devices or external devices connected?  If so, remove all external devices and try to boot.

nodylpm · Answer

Thanks for the reply. Tried that but no joy. The only USB devices attached were the mouse and keyboard.

nodylpm · Answer

Sorry  - meant to say in my last post that in an earlier attempt to sort out the graphics issue I had run the diagnostics using the symptom tree and they seemed to suggest that the graphics card was ok. It was only when I used 3rd party software to test the 3d rendering inside the vista environment that errors started coming up.

nodylpm · Answer

xcator - thanks for the advice. I had tried this before but I don't have an installation disk as the dell OS image is on the hd. Unfortunately as I can't access the hd can't run startup repair. I had actually tried in an attempt to deal with the graphics issue (again no real rational reason - more a stab in the dark) this before the boot up problem but didn't really do anything.

osprey4 - if I can solve the boot problem (hmmm) I will try this. I had actually run dell diagnostics on the cpu an the memory and all seemed fine. I seem to remember there was a more detailed set of tests after this and the machine just hung at this stage - something to do with no hard drive. Unfortunately I don't remember the exact error message. Just remember a dull sense of resignation.

Again thanks to you both for your advice.

xcator · Answer

glad you figured it out.

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Missing operating system fault after some severe video issues

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