One of my coworkers brought me a computer (Dell XPS 410) which she originally thought was having graphics card problems.

- It starts the BIOS just fine, but once it attempts to load Windows XP, it just stalls at a black screen (no Windows logo). I figured something might be wrong with the master boot record, so I tried to run the recovery console from a full XP install disc. While attempting to load Windows from the disc, it consistently presents the blue screen of death and won't even reach the option to load the recovery console.

- Next thought was to try to boot in safe mode, but it won't do that either. It gets about 3 lines of startup instructions onscreen, then hangs up.

- I figured at this point I ought to see if there was a larger hardware problem with the motherboard or RAM, and also to find out if the data on the HDD was even recoverable. I removed the problematic drive and swapped it with another drive which had nothing but a clean XP install. It worked perfectly fine, so I slaved the problem drive to the fresh drive and the data is all there. I've run memtest diagnostics and a couple of other tools to check the hardware, and it all seems fine.

Not really sure what to do next aside from recommend that we try to extract as much data from the problem HDD as possible and then reformat and reinstall. Anyone got a suggestion I haven't thought of yet?

3/5/2011 11:12:07 AM

This happened to me once, turns out one of my sticks of RAM was bad even though memtest reported it as good.

3/5/2011 11:39:49 AM