Booting up problems

[anrewc]

I have a Dell Inspiron 9400 (MP061, BIOS A00) with XP Pro.
The problem is that on start up, the laptop starts to Boot and freezes with the loading bar at ~1/4 loaded. I have tried several times to get it to boot (even tried to hit the Fn button on boot to do a diagnostic) but no luck...it just freezes.
Any ideas as to what I should try? I've had it suggested it might be the PSU...as I said any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

 

[davisjaron]

I doubt that the PSU is causing the computer to freeze on the boot up... it's either a hard drive, motherboard, or processor failure, or a corrupt OS... try reinstalling the OS first and see if that works. If that doesn't work it's possible that it's the hard drive failing to find certain OS files, but before you start wasting money to replace stuff... i'd recommend taking it to your local geeksquad and having them run a diagnostic on the computer; that will test for hardware failures if it is one... But certainly try to reinstall your operating system first... if it's a dell it should have come with recovery disks...

 

[B00kWyrm]

Upon Boot...
You may have a bios password,
You may have a hard drive password...

As soon as you are done with you passwords, immediately press f8, (repeatedly if necessary)
to try to boot to safe mode...
If you can boot to safe mode, we can do more diagnositcs from there...

Meanwhile... Get memtest... (Obviously you have another way onto the internet...)
Look here
https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic62524.html
and here
https://www.techspot.com/downloads/500-memtest.html

You will burn the iso to a cd which will then be bootable.
Be prepared to let it run a long time... maybe over night or longer...

Hard-drive diagnostics may also be in order...
And... depending on what we start finding, (once we can get to a windows screen...)
we may have you moving over to the virus and malware board with a new thread.

Post results of Memtest and Hard drive diagnostics...
You can probably get the details of your hard drive by going into your bios...
Once you know the hard drive maker, you can download their tools for their drives...
again... these will probably boot from their own disk, getting around a boot error on your hard drive.
If you can get to Safe Mode, then zip and attach your most recent 3 or 4 minidumps.

This gives you a starting place.

Responding to davisjaron's post...
Don't go radical yet... I have been wrong before, but (imho)
Neither Geek squad nor reinstallation are called for yet.

 

[davisjaron]

i still think it sounds like an OS problem... I would try to reinstall the OS and see if that works...