I would do the diagnostic on the HDD as ejn63 suggests and if you have a floppy drive for the notebook boot using the floppy drive and a floppy boot disk to see how fast the unit really boots. It should start right up to a A:\> prompt fairly quickly. If it starts fine from a boot floopy then you either have a HDD problem or a operating system problem and depending on what type of OS problem you have no amount of restore/repair installs you do it will not correct it. You will need to wipe (format) the HDD and do a clean/fresh install of the OS. If you have a hardware problem, bad HDD or other part, you will need to replace that part.
I think your problem is a virus, Trojan and or a corrupted OS but running the diagnostic program is the first thing you should do.
If you never re-partitioned and formatted the HDD then you can hit the F12 function key and you will get a option to boot to the diagnostic program that is in a small FAT32 partition on the drive. Or you can set the BIOS to boot from the CD drive and use the "Drivers & Utility" CD that came with your system to boot the system and run the diagnostic program. I suggest the second option. When booting from the CD drive you need to watch the screen for a on screen prompt that will read something like "Boot from CD hit any key" when you see that hit a key.
Yes, well, but I have had "Zone Alarm" on here for a couple of months, and it was just yesterday after I had it "lock-up" trying to access a disk I had burned some pictures on in my sisters machine that it started acting like this. The disk just had problems. I went back and burned them to another disk and it went fine. (It was just a bunch of .JPG files). But after that my machine isn't the same. So should I "uninstall" Zone Alarm? Or update it?
I note that you say you cannot run chkdsk now. By any chance have you installed zone alarm version 5 on your hard disk as this is a documented problem.
The latest version of Zone Alarm which was released a few days ago seems to have this problem sorted.
YES YES YES!
bacillus you ARE a LIFEsaver! I uninstalled "Zone Alarm", rebooted and YAHOOO it boot up quicker, set it to "scandisk" and YESS it did it! Then my "virus program" wouldn't work anymore for some reason, but I uninstalled it and downloading a new copy to install now. BUT, AWESOME! It is quick as ever now. I will now do all the maintenance and diagnostics, Thanks a MILLION all. Ed
Ed_Borg
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August 1st, 2004 05:00
ejn63
9 Legend
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87.5K Posts
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August 1st, 2004 09:00
Boot and run the Dell diagnostics on the hard drive - including a surface scan.
Ed C
2 Intern
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3.2K Posts
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August 1st, 2004 10:00
I would do the diagnostic on the HDD as ejn63 suggests and if you have a floppy drive for the notebook boot using the floppy drive and a floppy boot disk to see how fast the unit really boots. It should start right up to a A:\> prompt fairly quickly. If it starts fine from a boot floopy then you either have a HDD problem or a operating system problem and depending on what type of OS problem you have no amount of restore/repair installs you do it will not correct it. You will need to wipe (format) the HDD and do a clean/fresh install of the OS. If you have a hardware problem, bad HDD or other part, you will need to replace that part.
I think your problem is a virus, Trojan and or a corrupted OS but running the diagnostic program is the first thing you should do.
Ed_Borg
11 Posts
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August 1st, 2004 11:00
How do I
"Boot and run the Dell diagnostics on the hard drive"?
Ed C
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3.2K Posts
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August 1st, 2004 12:00
Ed_Borg
11 Posts
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August 1st, 2004 12:00
bacillus
2 Intern
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14.4K Posts
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August 1st, 2004 12:00
The latest version of Zone Alarm which was released a few days ago seems to have this problem sorted.
Ed_Borg
11 Posts
0
August 1st, 2004 14:00