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Dimension E510 won't boot to utility disk
Hi all. Thanks in advance for any help. My 5 year old Dimension E510 contains Dell DM051 Series BIOS version A05. When working, it had Windows XP Media Center running. It had a stubborn rootkit virus early last Spring. I thought I got rid of it but maybe not. In May, the hard drive started "crunching" and machine wouldn't boot. After trying to revive it (to no avail), I put the project aside and unplugged machine. Thankfully, I had recently backed up to an external hard drive so I am not worried about that.
Anyway, I am now back at trying to get things up and running. When I hit F12 key, I can run a hard drive diagnostic which says that hard drive has failed. I have a new hard drive on order but want to see if anything else is wrong. In an effort to run other diagnostics, I try to boot to Dell Drivers and Utilities disk but can't. I have changed my boot sequence in "Setup" but can't get it to work. What's weird (or maybe not) is that in "Setup -Drives", Drive 0 is recognized as the SATA hard drive and Drive 2 is my DVD drive (drive details are HL-DT-ST DVD+/-RW GWA4164B). But in "Setup-Boot Sequence", my options are as follows:
1. Onboard or USB CD-ROM Drive
2. Onboard or USB Floppy Drive (not present)
3. Onboard SATA Hard Drive (not present)
4. Onboard IDE Hard Drive (not present)
I save/exit and am taken to a black screen that says "No boot device available - strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility". If I power down and then up again and go to F12, my boot device menu is as follows:
*Onboard or USB CD-ROM drive
*System Setup
*Hard Drive Diagnostics
*Boot to Utility Partition
When I hit "Onboard or USB CD-ROM", it says "selected boot device not available. The DVD drive spins and seemingly has power. I have tried another bootable disk but that doesn't work either. I have done all of the above with hard drive connected and disconnected, but all results the same. I should note too that despite being unplugged for 7 months, the BIOS clock is still accurate with date/time.
Any thoughts? I am a novice so feel free to dumb it down for me. Thanks again.
527
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Posted January 11th, 2012 09:00
Thanks for your reply. I just tried reseating (by that, I assume you mean unplugging and replugging) the ribbon cable between the DVD drive and the motherboard. I also reseated the blue cable that runs between the hard drive and motherboard. I have reseated the muli-colored, multi-wired cable that runs between the hard drive and (I assume) power supply -- but only on the hard drive end. I am too afraid to mess with the power supply area for the moment. Anyway, the above did not give me any different result when I powered up.
Before I reseat the battery, do you think it makes sense to wait until I have a chance to swap out the hard drive (I can borrow one from a neighbor tonight) to see if that gets me anywhere? Or maybe that doesn't matter? I guess, what I am asking is whether you think there is a downside to reseating battery next or whether trying a different hard drive will help?
Thanks again.
527
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Posted January 11th, 2012 10:00
The battery is not a "reseat", removing the battery, for the time noted, resets the CMOS Memory (BIOS). If the BIOS (Setup) is not properly seeing devices sometimes this will correct that. According to what you posted you can access the Dell diagnostics on the hard drive but the BIOS (Setup) is saying there is nothing connected.
Inspiron 16 5630 Laptop and WD22TB4 Docking StationSelf-built desktop for recording studio application527
0
Posted January 11th, 2012 19:00
Okay. I went ahead and removed the battery for about 20 minutes. No change other than being told the clock needed to be reset. My neighbor is loaning me a hard drive in addition to an external cd drive and a bootable usb stick (with diagnostics) tomorrow morning. We'll see what happens then. Thanks for your suggestions. If you or anyone else has any additional ideas, would love to hear them.
527
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Posted January 13th, 2012 18:00
Here are a few more details if anyone can help. The computer will boot to the working hard drive I tried. The drive is wiped of an OS so I don't get very far. But no "crunching" and it does seem to boot. Then I installed an internal cd drive to see if my Dell diagnostic DVD would boot in it. It didn't. BIOS recognized the device in the "drives" and "boot sequence" portions of "setup" but dvd will not boot up (no bootable device error). The good news was that I did get Dell diagnostics to run off of a usb stick. I ran dell diagnostics and learned that there was a DVD drive failure. Hard drive (still had the neighbor's one hooked up) came up fine as did the CD drive.
So I figured I would get a cheap DVD drive and to see if my Windows XP installation DVD would boot up and I would see if I could load it onto the borrowed hard drive. I purchased a USB DVD drive today. It is neither recognized in "drives" or in "boot sequence". It's odd because the usb stick is detected but not the DVD drive.
Any thought? Thanks in advance.
fireberd
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527
0
Posted January 11th, 2012 08:00
I have an E510.
With the drive not found problems, it sounds like something on the motherboard is at the root of the problem and not the drives. Since it's been sitting, one thought is a bad cable connection. You say you have connected/disconnected but did you reseat the IDE Ribbon cable at both ends of the cable? (for the CD/DVD drive) and the SATA data cable for the hard drive?
Try resetting the BIOS and that may also help. With the PC powered off, remove the CR2032 CMOS backup battery on the motherboard for at least 10 minutes (Intel says 15 minutes). Reinstall, observing battery polarity and try.