Dell Inspiron 6000 - Will not turn on.

[[Daisuke]]

I went out today, with my laptop running on my desk, the lid shut. I have to say, my room gets a little warm, as it's in the sun for most of the day, but the laptop was out of direct sunlight. I returned, and opened up the lid, and wiggled the mouse to get the screen to turn back on, and nothing happened. I waited a while, and still nothing. I tried the space bar a couple of times, but still nothing happened, so I turned it off (held the power buttong for 4 seconds) and waited for a minute or so, then tried turning it back on.

When I pressed the button, the power light came on, and all three of the Num/Caps/Scroll lock lights flashed on fora bout a second, then off, and after 5 minutes or so, nothing else had happened. Only the powerlight remained on. If I tap the power button in this state, it turns off instantly. This is the same with the power cord, and alone with the battery. The battery does charge.

Help me, please. Ah yes, I got the laptop second hand, from a friend. He had water damaged the motherboard, and said if I could fix it, I could have it. I bought a replacement motherboard from a seller on eBay, and it worked just fine, until now. I had had no problems at all with it until about an hour ago, when I returned.

Many thanks, Pete C

[PEBKAC]

possible faulty motherboard.... any warranty on it through the ebay seller?

[[Daisuke]]

There was a 7 day warranty with them.

::EDIT::

As a further note, I left it off for several hours, then tried to turn it back on again. This resulted in it getting past the POST and coming to a screen saying htat a file was corrupt, and that windows needs to be repaired. Although I pressed the space bar, and it just went to a blank screen, then I turned it off, and on again, and it owered up as described in the first post.

::EDIT2::

It got to the file corrupt; the file is \WINDOWS\system32\c_1252.nls

[pdxsteve]

']There was a 7 day warranty with them.

::EDIT::

As a further note, I left it off for several hours, then tried to turn it back on again. This resulted in it getting past the POST and coming to a screen saying htat a file was corrupt, and that windows needs to be repaired. Although I pressed the space bar, and it just went to a blank screen, then I turned it off, and on again, and it owered up as described in the first post.

::EDIT2::

It got to the file corrupt; the file is \WINDOWS\system32\c_1252.nls

Sounds like a hard drive problem. Can you boot to the Diagnostic partition and run a hard drive test?

[[Daisuke]]

Can you instruct me as to how to do that? The fact that it only sometimes boots up to that tells me that there is another problem somewhere, probably on the motherboard.

[cognitive77]

']Can you instruct me as to how to do that? The fact that it only sometimes boots up to that tells me that there is another problem somewhere, probably on the motherboard.


Dude, mine just started doing the same thing, but I can't get anywhere past the black screen. I was using my laptop, and the thing froze up on me, so I did a hard shut down. Now nothing but black screen, but does turn on.

Difference in mine is that it is just shy over a year old and has never had water damage. I hooked it up to an external monitor and hit Fn LCD/Mtr and it wouldnt come up on my desktop monitor. It actually feels like its not shutting all the way down though. For example, when I power down and power back on, you can hear the Windows start up theme.

[AMDSpeed]

One thing you could try is to put the Windows XP CD into the CD-Drive and try to boot to it. If you do not get to the (Press any button to boot to CD...) then I would rule out the hard-drive being damaged. Or if you do not get to or past post for that matter.

Hope this helps.

[[Daisuke]]

Thanks, I'll try that tomorrow, it's 3:25 am here now, I hope it works.