Inspiron 580, won't boot after new win 7 install

If you ran diagnostics with F12 at boot, and you had a memory failure error then yes the RAM modules will have to be replaced.

But with a 10 year old system, just how much do you want to spend on repairs? The system is very old technology and even some of the more basic new systems will vastly outperform it. It may be time to consider a new, modern, far superior new system. And you should be able to use the new SATA drive in a new system.

This PC worked great until the hard drive failure. My wife uses it primarily for checking her email and playing some Facebook games. So, I don't have any problem with dropping a little money into it. It is basically a backup unit, as we have a relatively new Dell XPS. Do you feel certain it is a memory failure? If you could send me an email, I would like to show the screen shots on the monitor of what it says. my email addy is   antiwarvet@att.net. Thank you for your response.

Richard

Open it up and remove the memory modules. Put one in at a time and rerun the test to see what one is a bad module. Once done you can look at buying some 2nd hand RAM from the likes of eBay to replace the faulty module. It is an old model now so not worth spending a lot of cash on.

Could be as simple as a RAM module got dislodged from its slot while you were replacing the hard drive. So carefully reseat all of them in their slots.

With the PC unplugged while replacing the hard drive, the motherboard battery probably got drained and may be near its end of life. So if you plan to fix the RAM problem and continue using this PC, you should replace the motherboard battery while you're in there dealing with the RAM modules. It's a CR2032 3-volt coin cell battery, ~$2 for a decent brand battery.

Thanks, found the bad memory stick.

My Dell Inspiron 580 is a 64 bit system. I have been running win 7 premium. I have a win 7 ultimate 32 bit OS disc with product key. Can I install this OS onto my 64 bit system? If so, how can I get the appropriate drivers, etc. for this?

Glad you got it working again.

Why would you want to install a 32-bit OS when you already have a 64-bit OS? That's a step backwards because a 32-bit OS can only support a max of 4 GB of RAM. Anything above 4 GB will be ignored, assuming the PC still boots.

Dell doesn't support 32-bit Win 7 on this model (only Vista 32-bit), so you'd have to dig around for 32-bit Win 7 drivers. IMHO, if it's working again with 64-bit Win 7 Premium, leave it alone!  :Wink:

And if the problem is solved, please mark this thread as answered.

Took your advice and my inspiron 580 up and running well.

I added a second hard drive and installed it for my XPS 8500 running win 8.1 64 bit. I guess it is referred to as a slave. Any way, I would like to install win 10 on it. Can you offer me the procedure, and steps to take for this operation?

Thanks for all your help.

I'm confused... :TongueTied:

What does the XPS 8500 have to do with the Inspiron 580? Or is this an entirely separate topic?

Go to the Microsoft site and follow the instructions to download and create a bootable USB stick with the latest version of Win 10. You'll need at least a 32-GB USB, even thought that site may say to use an 8- or 16-GB stick.

Disconnect the second hard drive while you're installing Win 10 on the boot drive so the installer doesn't get "confused". And it will be better to wipe the boot drive and do a clean install instead of installing Win 10 "on top" of Win 8.1. So be sure to back up all your files on external media and make sure you have the Product Keys to activate any software you will need to install (eg, Microsoft Office) after Win 10 is running...

Sorry, didn't change the subject line. Thanks for the help. How do I get the necessary drivers for win 10?