PLEASE HELP Sick Laptop

Harrietxxx

My daughter's laptop is poorly. It is a DELL Inspiron 1525 bought in May last year. When I turn it on I briefly get the Dell screen then just a blank screen with the cursor flashing in top left corner. I cannot use any of the letters etc to type anything. Next to the on button are three padlock thingys and the last one with the number 9 in it is lit.

Has anyone got any ideas please

Ta muchly

asininity

Have you got a memory stick plugged into it?

Harrietxxx

asininity wrote: »

Have you got a memory stick plugged into it?

No, disk drive empty as well

asininity

What disk drive? I was talking about a usb memory stick.

Have you got a CD in the DVD drive? Have you check the boot priority in the BIOS?

KingL

The lock thingy is just indicating that the numlock is on (it's similar to caps lock). This won't be the cause of your problem.

For the sake of clarity - perhaps you could say what drives you have in your PC (e.g. floppy disc drive, optical (CD/DVD), card reader (SD cards, etc)...

My guess is that your hard drive has become unseated or corrupted and the computer cannot see it to boot the machine. You might end up having to boot from an external disc...

Harrietxxx

Right, there is a CD/DVD drive which is empty, no card reader, no memory sticks plugged in to USB port, no floppy drive.

I don't know what the BIOS thing is i'm afraid, sorry.

How do I boot externally? using what?

The padlock lit was just num lock, I am a dufus

KingL

There is a setting in bios that tells the computer which drive(s) and in what sequence to look for the software to boot the computer into action. asinity's hypothesis was that your computer was setup to look at either a USB drive or a drive other than C: for the software. If you had a USB key or disc in that didn't contain boot software, then the computer may never get around to looking at c: for the boot software. You could get around this by changing the bios settings to look at C: first. If you don't have any devices/discs in at the moment, this approach is probably redundant now, but for the record, you get to the bios setup by tapping the F1 key as the computer is starting up.

If you don't have a boot disc that came with the computer and if your antivirus has never prompted you to create one, you could get one from here http://www.bootdisk.com/

Alternatively, just google for bootdisc/bootdisk . You will need to have another computer and the ability to burn a CD as an image. I think that you can find ones that you can download to a USB key. You may have to format it to be bootable first. Don't do anything yet, tho. Someone may come along with an easier solution...

asininity

You could also download a Linux Live CD which if it booted up would mean its a software issue.

Donnie

asininity wrote: »

You could also download a Linux Live CD which if it booted up would mean its a software issue.

Why would it be so? It wouldn't run from the HDD, so how would that eliminate a hardware fault?

Donnie

Harrietxxx wrote: »

My daughter's laptop is poorly. It is a DELL Inspiron 1525 bought in May last year. When I turn it on I briefly get the Dell screen then just a blank screen with the cursor flashing in top left corner. I cannot use any of the letters etc to type anything. Next to the on button are three padlock thingys and the last one with the number 9 in it is lit.

Has anyone got any ideas please

Ta muchly

Things to check... that the RAM modules are seated properly and whether you can boot in to Safe Mode. If you can, you should run System Restore.

Running a Live CD will let you know if the RAM modules are ok.

A good one with which to begin is the Avira Rescue System

asininity

The LiveCD runs from the CD not the HD, therefore the software on the HD is not touched. Roger so far;). Once booted up into the desktop you can then mount the HD and view the files on it. If you can do all this it means the hardware is working fine so it must be a software issue. Now this takes less than twenty minutes and is always worth a shot, mainly because it saves the hassle of troubleshooting hardware unnecessarily.