Aastii
VIP Member
yesterday I got a call from one of my mums friends saying their laptop wasn't working, so I went around to have a look. Right from the start, here is what happened (Note the guy is lovely, but not very tech savvy, so what I put is all I know and all he knows):
He called me saying he was on his computer on the internet and a yellow Symantec box came up saying his email could not be decrypted and several more came up, so he restarted, and when he did, it wouldn't boot back into windows.
when I checked it, what happens is it will post then go to a black screen and not boot to windows, as he said. I put my windows xp disc in which I just so happened to take with me in my cd case, and ran repair and it came up with nothing. I bare booted as best as I could with a laptop, I put just 1 stick of memory in and booted, still nothing, put it all back, changed device priority back to HDD from CD drive (you have to have HDD first if it is enabled, stupid bloody Dell design) and amazingly, it booted.
It was up and working fine, how, I don't know, so checked to see if he had norton on there, which he didn't, so I was thinking it was a virus. Other than malwarebytes, he had nothing on there but what comes with windows, so the crap firewall, so I went to install Avast! for him. It downloaded fine, installed very nearly fine, but decided to restart itself. It had an instantaneous BSOD that I only just saw, and then it wouldn't boot into XP again and won't now.
I left it last night running memtest as a just incase, you never know
and went back today with no errors, which I wasn't surprised at, but still not booting. I stuck ubuntu in to see if I couldn't see more from there but nothing at all without installing, whichn't really feasable, dual booting on a 60GB hard drive doesn't work.
Short of formatting and starting again, which I don't want to do unless I must, I can;t see anything more I can do. I can't transfer the HDD into my system to use it because it is IDE and I don't have an adapter, otherwise I would try that.
It is a Dell Inspiron 9300, any ideas are more than welcome, because I am stumped
He called me saying he was on his computer on the internet and a yellow Symantec box came up saying his email could not be decrypted and several more came up, so he restarted, and when he did, it wouldn't boot back into windows.
when I checked it, what happens is it will post then go to a black screen and not boot to windows, as he said. I put my windows xp disc in which I just so happened to take with me in my cd case, and ran repair and it came up with nothing. I bare booted as best as I could with a laptop, I put just 1 stick of memory in and booted, still nothing, put it all back, changed device priority back to HDD from CD drive (you have to have HDD first if it is enabled, stupid bloody Dell design) and amazingly, it booted.
It was up and working fine, how, I don't know, so checked to see if he had norton on there, which he didn't, so I was thinking it was a virus. Other than malwarebytes, he had nothing on there but what comes with windows, so the crap firewall, so I went to install Avast! for him. It downloaded fine, installed very nearly fine, but decided to restart itself. It had an instantaneous BSOD that I only just saw, and then it wouldn't boot into XP again and won't now.
I left it last night running memtest as a just incase, you never know
and went back today with no errors, which I wasn't surprised at, but still not booting. I stuck ubuntu in to see if I couldn't see more from there but nothing at all without installing, whichn't really feasable, dual booting on a 60GB hard drive doesn't work.Short of formatting and starting again, which I don't want to do unless I must, I can;t see anything more I can do. I can't transfer the HDD into my system to use it because it is IDE and I don't have an adapter, otherwise I would try that.
It is a Dell Inspiron 9300, any ideas are more than welcome, because I am stumped
