Dell Laptop

undercoverblonde

closed wrote: »

do any of those work, last known good config?

Nope

Ok will try crtl F11 and F10

Tried both and just get the same screen I get on start up, i.e. We apologize blah blah safe mode

grumpycrab

Blimey, must have covered all the boot options by now... Do you have a Dell recovery disk (or disks)?

HardWorker2010_2

undercoverblonde wrote: »

Nope

Ok will try crtl F11 and F10

Tried both and just get the same screen I get on start up, i.e. We apologize blah blah safe mode

Do you mean you tried Ctrl F10 / Ctrl F11 and got that result?

undercoverblonde

grumpycrab wrote: »

Blimey, must have covered all the boot options by now... Do you have a Dell recovery disk (or disks)?

No nothing

undercoverblonde

HardWorker2010 wrote: »

Do you mean you tried Ctrl F10 / Ctrl F11 and got that result?

I tried both with and without ctrl, everything just gives me the same screen

undercoverblonde

I now have: Use up and down arrows to point to desired boot, Internal HDD, CD/DVD/CD-RW Drive, Cardbus NIC, Onboard NIC, Diagnostics but the arrows now won't work so I can't select anything

grumpycrab

That's unfortunate. Have you had an accident with this laptop? Guess tab doesn't work!?

Idea1. Ctrl-F11 didn't work IMMEDIATELY after power-on? (don't wait for logo)

Idea2:- Reboot select F2 (system setup); find POST BEHAVIOUR and where it says FAST BOOT select THOROUGH (may not be there; depends on laptop)

undercoverblonde

grumpycrab wrote: »

That's unfortunate. Have you had an accident with this laptop? Guess tab doesn't work!?

Idea1. Ctrl-F11 didn't work IMMEDIATELY after power-on? (don't wait for logo)

Idea2:- Reboot select F2 (system setup); find POST BEHAVIOUR and where it says FAST BOOT select THOROUGH (may not be there; depends on laptop)

No it worked fine last time I used it and has been kept in its case since then.

It eventually came up with keyboard stuck failure which I guess is not what we are looking for

Did the F2 thing and still the same Im afraid

Bogtrotter

I stand to be corrected but I think the recovery partition with has only become standard since the advent of Vista/Windows 7... the last Dell laptop I had with WondowsXP (admittedly 6 years ago) had to pay extra for recovery CDs or you had to burn your own recovery CDs I don't think you could automatically start from a recovery partition.

The good news is that any Dell CD will do... maybe a friend has one you could borrow then go to the Dell website and download the drivers for your specific model.

If you can't borrow a CD it may still be possible to reanimate your existing computer. The symptoms you describe sound like a corrupt registry... it may be possible to restore the registry from a backup that is automatically created within the Windows/system32/config folder or the System Volume Information folder on the c: drive.

To be able to do this you will need either a Windows CD from which you can boot to starts a DOS console or some sort of live CD which allows you to copy files from one directory to another on your hard disk drive.

Google "windowsxp manual system restore" and you should find a guide.

undercoverblonde

Thanks for all the replies. I will try again tomorrow, having a glass of wine instead