My laptop problem.....PLEASE HELP

[X24]

Well, right now i'm having a problem. I was on a trip, and i had my Dell Inspiron 9300 with me. Well, i think what happend was i turned it off by pushing the power button once, and it was saving my settings, and then i held the power button down and it shut down.

Now, it only load the Dell Bios, and won't load XP.

I've tired to boot from CD, but it shows push any button to boot from
CD, then i push a button and it says "setup is inspecting your computers harware......." then i hear the HDD spinning like its doing something, then nothing, the screen just stays blank.

PLEASE HELP ME

 

[goosy22]

Well, right now i'm having a problem. I was on a trip, and i had my Dell Inspiron 9300 with me. Well, i think what happend was i turned it off by pushing the power button once, and it was saving my settings, and then i held the power button down and it shut down.

Now, it only load the Dell Bios, and won't load XP.

I've tired to boot from CD, but it shows push any button to boot from
CD, then i push a button and it says "setup is inspecting your computers harware......." then i hear the HDD spinning like its doing something, then nothing, the screen just stays blank.

PLEASE HELP ME

hmm... i'd check your BIOS settings and make sure that nothing got screwed up... like boot order or having your HDD being disabled, or something like that...

that's all i can think of...

EDIT: how long do you wait after the blank screen to restart the computer??? i mean it may take a while to get through it... i would suggest letting it set for a while to see if it goes anywhere...

 

[X24]

what should the boot order be?
should i change in POST Behavior the fastboot thing, should i switch it from minimal to thorough?

 

[X24]

I tried both and no good. I'm still just sitting here waiting for it to try and go...... it says "setup is inspecting your computers harware configuration" then that message dissapears and it just sits there.....u can't even hear anything going on with the computer.

 

[X24]

Sorry for the triple post, but i REALLY need help here

i'm going on a long trip at the end of the week and i want to get it fixed before then

 

[Technogab]

Sounds like something may be corrupted on the hard drive. Just to rule stuff out, I would try loading another OS like Linux just to see if the install goes through. Sometimes loading a different OS and formatting the drive with the new OS will actually correct some hard drive errors. If Linux loads up OK, then throw your XP CD back in and blow out Linux and re-install Windows.

I had that happen once on a desktop PC. I had to load Linux and re-partition the drive and format it. Then I was able to install Windows with no problem. Weird.

There are also bootable CD's with tools such as Bart PE that you can use which has some disk utilities on them.

 

[X24]

i'd load up linux, but right now i'm on dial-up and i think about the smallest linux is puppy linux which is 40mb which would take a few hours to download