Try booting without the battery. But it sounds like you have narrowed it down to the motherboard.

Thanks for your reply, ieee.

Not sure what booting without battery would do, but it didn't work.  I doubt whether it's the motherboard as I was able to browse around the C: partition after booting from a boot-able DVD.

Bjoern

Then your hard drive is toast.

Hi Brh56,

Welcome to the Community. As suggested by ieee488 it could be an issue with your hard drive. To make sure its your hard drive, I suggest you run a diagnostics. Press the F12 key at the Dell logo on startup, select Diagnostics and run a exended diagnostics on your hard drive.

Thank you

Royan

Thanks Royan.

I did start the diagnostics, but then it stopped, stating that no Diagnostics Utility Partition found".  

This is true, as I replaced this hard drive when the old one croaked a few months ago.  I performed a fresh install of Windows XP, there are no more Dell utilities on this hdd.  

As I stated before, I was able to boot from a CD and browse the C: partition.  All my data files and programs are still there.  

Bjoern

Hi

Yes you can download it from the support site. But there is an update going on the support site, so the site is down as off now, so I do not have a link to give you to download.

Log on to support.dell.com, click on drivers and downloads, enter your service tag, you should find the Diagnostic utility under Diagnostics.

Thank you

Royan

What size drive do you have?

Too late, I just started a fresh install, formatting as I type.

Thanks for your info.

Bjoern

Just make sure that if you  are installing a drive over 120G, that you create a 120G partition for Windows as the first one on the disc.  You can then create a second partition to use the rest of the drive once WIndows is installed - but under no circumstances can the boot partition cross the 120 G barrier.  If it does, you will one day lose the data on the drive.

Hi Royan.

I don't have a Dell utility disk.  Is it available online?

Bjoern

Maybe that's how it croaked: it's a 250Gb hdd, using one partition.

Thanks for the advice.

Bjoern

Thanks for your replies.

In the end, I repartitioned the drive into 3 smaller partitions and re-installed Windows.  The old PC is like new again, not toast, thank goodness.

Cheers,

Bjoern