Hello,

Recently i've been having the following intermittent problem with my laptop. When i turn it on, the fujitsu siemens screen comes up, then the screen goes black, i hear the cd/dvd drive starts up for a few seconds & it then stops and and thats it! It gets stuck on the black screen and nothing else happens!
This only ever happens when there is a disc in the drive. I have to take out the disc and then turn it off and on again and then it starts up ok.

Some times when this happens, after the fs screen comes up the the black screen is filled with random colored symbols and letter and occasionally this is accompanied with a high pitched noise.

I have managed to bypass the problem by changing the boot order in the bios, moving the optical drive below the hard disk. However this only skips over the problem and is not really a fix.

does anybody have any ideas? has anybody else come across this before?

Thanks in advance.

p.s this has also been posted in the FS forum, hopefully between this forum the the FS Forum, some one will have an idea as how to fix my laptop

This is a problem if you can't use bootable discs like the recovery cd anymore.

On the other hand, why would you keep any other disc in there during bootup? It's a good habit to empty the drive after every session, or even whenever it's not actively used. Probably prolongs its lifespan.

this is a intermittent problem so sometimes bootable disks do work.

i do keep disks in the disks drives sometimes (probably out of laziness)however i never knew you weren’t supposed to keep discs in the drive. I've never had problems booting with cds/dvds in the drives of my other laptops/computers.

Random multi-colored characters on screen might mean a busted memory stick. Try different RAM sticks with the laptop and test for stability.

thanks for your suggestion ideas, Unfortunately i do not have any memory sticks lying around to test your theory, is there another way to test this without having to change the memory already in the laptop?

If you have more than one RAM stick in there it might be worthwhile to test each separately.
Since you said you hear a high-pitched noise, have you tested the hard drive for physical failure? You can do this using Hitachi's superb Drive Fitness Test tool. Get it here: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT