Inspiron on endless restart loop

Question

Hi,
I have a Dell Inspiron 5160 laptop. 768mb ram.

Problems started yesterday when it wouldn't boot up beyond the dell boot screen. On about the fifth attempt it booted into Windows fine, and shut down OK. On powering up a second time the system hung on the boot screen - 3/4 across the progress bar. It wouldn't go into setup or boot sequence etc. I checked the RAM and heatsink/fan. The bios recognises memory size changes. Now when powering up, the bios goes through the opening Dell screen, then restarts, goes through the opening Dell screen and restarts etc, on an endless loop.

Please tell me what it wrong with it!!! There's half a novel on the hard drive!

Separate issue - I've ordered an almost identical 5160 off ebay - I'm assuming I should be able to swap the Hard Drive (provided the Hard Drive isn't the part that's faulty).

ejn63 · Answer

Remove the hard drive. Will the system POST?

tomtolkien · Answer

Already tried that - has no effect. System appears to post. Is it a bios problem?

ejn63 · Answer

Reseat the RAM, drives, battery and any cards. If it still won't POST, the mainboard is likely faulty.

mr_steamy · Answer

Have had similar problems on a PC. Turned out to be a problem with the Main Boot Record (MBR) on the boot hard drive.

This can be fixed by booting into DOS (can use windows install CD to do this) then run the DOS programme "FIXMBR".

tomtolkien · Answer

The same restart loop occurs when there is no hard drive present in the machine - I'm assuming that would rule out a hard drive problem. Also, the bios won't enter setup via f2, or boot to other drives via f12, or boot to cd. I'm wondering if it's a bios problem or a mainboard problem

JimG1 · Answer

Well, misery loves company. Perhaps you can take solace in the fact that my Inspiron 5160 has EXACTLY the same symptoms as yours.

I did remove my 100GB (90% full) hard drive and put it up to one of those little 2.5 inch USB2.0 external enclosures that you can buy for around $20-30 at a computer store and then hooked it up to my desktop and copied every single file off it onto my desktop hard drive. So...at least I have lost "no data". I would bet you can do the same thing. This may not help get your computer fixed but at least you won't have lost any data.

Good luck. (I'm going to buy a new one. I got 2 good years out of mine and don't want to put any more $$ into it.)

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Inspiron on endless restart loop

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