can't get a Dell to boot up properly

demonikal

demonikal

New Member
My friend gave me his Dell Latitude D600 laptop with Windows XP Home to work on. Just doing him a favor. Whether I choose "Start Windows" normally, "Boot into Safe Mode", "Boot into Safe Mode with Networking", or "Boot into Safe Mode with DOS", I get the same results which is that default light blue background when starting Windows normally or the black background with "Safe Mode" in all four corners, but no icons or anything. It will let me go into Setup to look at the configuration, but that's it.

He told me he got the laptop second-hand from his brother's g/f and it did not come with a restore disk. Apparently, this Dell does have a restore disk so I'm assuming it has a restore partition. I can't find a free d/L for the restore disk, but I wasn't expecting one.

Is there anything else I can do that I'm not thinking of?

Thanks!!
 
Yeah, pretty much your best option is to contact dell for the system restore disks, they usually ship them out to you for free. Once you restore it, not only will it be faster, but it should work perfectly fine.
 
I doubt very seriously if they will still have a recovery disk for the D600. In fact, I just worked on 2 of them recently. One had a bad hdd and I just replaced it yesterday. I would do a drive diagnostic and see if maybe the drive has errors on it or it could be failling.
 
johnb35 said:
I doubt very seriously if they will still have a recovery disk for the D600. In fact, I just worked on 2 of them recently. One had a bad hdd and I just replaced it yesterday. I would do a drive diagnostic and see if maybe the drive has errors on it or it could be failling.
Click to expand...

I'm not exactly sure how to do a drive diagnostic like you said. Would that require d/Ling a diagnostic tool, burning it to CD, and then starting the Dell up with it in the DVD-ROM??

Thanks!
 
demonikal said:
I'm not exactly sure how to do a drive diagnostic like you said. Would that require d/Ling a diagnostic tool, burning it to CD, and then starting the Dell up with it in the DVD-ROM??

Thanks!
Click to expand...

They had recovery Disks for my Dell Dimension 2400 I obtained from a friend, and the pc is about 7 years old. I'm not saying you're wrong, just saying its worth a shot.
 
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