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Dell totally hooked me up with a replacement laptop, now it has some issues!
Dell replaced my refurb'd 1720 with another 1720 with some much better hardware in it. The replacement has a T7250 proc, 8600M GT vid card, Blu-Ray player/DVD burner, and the 160GB free-fall sensor hard drive. The problem I'm finding with the replacement is:
95% of the time when you boot the laptop, it will post the bios, then it will just go to a black screen. I can see the HD light on the laptop blinking, but the O/S will not load. I have to hold down the power button to power down the laptop, then when I re-start it, I'm presented with the "Windows did not load properly" screen. I then have the option to start Windows normally, or to run "startup repair". No matter which I choose, Windows will load upon reboot. The next time I try to boot the computer, it will do the same thing again. It will freeze after the POST screen.
Will switching to ATA mode help anything? Can I switch to ATA mode w/o reformatting? Any help will be appreciated.
Balaji Ramanath
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Posted May 8th, 2008 17:00
I wonder if the freefall sensor is somehow locking up the drive and preventing full boot-up the first time you turn it on. Perhaps a glitch in the sensor, resulting in a faulty hard drive. Can you try the laptop with a different hard drive and see if the behavior persists?- That's my next step. I'm currently out of town, but as soon as I return I'm going to hit my buddy up (I think he has an extra notebook drive). My next step after that is to reformat the drive and install XP pro to see if the issue persists. I'm leaning more to it being a hardware issue than a software issue though.
davids2004
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Posted May 9th, 2008 14:00
Were you able to boot up in safe mode at all?Balaji Ramanath
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Posted May 9th, 2008 15:00
Good luck and do post back with your findings.That's the strange thing, I don't need to try to boot into safe mode. Once it locks up, if I hold down the power button to power down the laptop, and then turn it back on, it takes me to the screen that says Windows did not load properly on the last attempt, and then asks if I want to start Windows normally, or run start-up repair. No matter which I choose, Windows will load on the next attempt, so there is no reason to boot into safe mode.
1hawaii50
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Posted May 8th, 2008 17:00