Dell Inspiron won't boot

[weasley]

After 5 years of light use, our home desktop has stumbled to a halt. When trying to boot it will:

- do the usual single beep at start
- show the Windows 7 'welcome' animated image
- screen goes blank
- single beep from the mobo
- black screen with "computer didn't start properly: run start-up recovery or start normally?"
- if I try to "start normally" it fails and the loop restarts
- if I try a recovery it looks for a recovery image and fails to find one. The only viable option from there is to shut down.

It is a Dell Inspiron 546, originally delivered with Vista but then upgraded to 7 shortly after.

My limited knowledge of such things makes me think the motherboard is somehow compromised (but await the crowd knowledge of teh BCF to verify/scoff at this diagnosis). The case has never been opened so it is as-built inside. When powered on I see a green power light on the back of the PC and a solid amber light on the motherboard, which is how it always was when it was working.

The 1 TB hard drive holds all of my digital pictures (around 35,000 at last count) and a little video. It is all recently backed up onto an external USB drive. There is some software on it that I have bought, but nothing I couldn't live without/replace.

Options?

Tinker with/upgrade this one? Repair/replace the mobo? Add a SSD, graphics card and such and learn a little as I go?

Or use this as the push I have been waiting for to jump ship to a Mac? We have a houseful of Apple products (iPhones, iPads, iPods, Apple TV) and no specific demand for a Windows PC.

The computer is/was pretty lightly used... a few games for the kids (nothing heavy, just simple puzzles etc), the occasional letter for printing, a bit of surfing. The heaviest use it got was importing, sorting and editing photographs and occasional video editing.
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[bugeye_bob]

ftp://ftp.dell.com/Manuals/all-products/esuprt_desktop/esuprt_inspiron_desktop/inspiron-546s_service%20manual_en-us.pdf

[sickpup]

Had this on several computers. Generally seems to be a corruption of windows that the recovery console cannot recover from. Unfortunately the more you restart the system the more it seems to corrupt.

Did you make the recovery discs when you got the desktop?

I suggest if you did then remove the hard drive, connect it to another computer to take off all the data you need and then perform a full recovery to standard.

If you didn't make the discs try and buy a set from somewhere and do the same as above.

[weasley]

I seem to remember doing recovery discs when I got it, but where they are now, two house moves later...... They would have been Windows Vista too.

The windows certificate code is still on the case, but again, this was from the original OEM Vista install.
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Yamaha XJ600 | Yamaha YZF600R Thundercat | KTM 990 SMT | BMW F900XR TE

[dabigginger]

Boot from the Windows 7 CD. There will be a repair option. That might work. If not, as said, copy any data off, re-format and re-install.

[Pete.]

[weasley]

I managed to run the "Pre-boot system assessment" and it returned a hard disk self-assessment failure, with an error code that suggests that either there's a connection problem, or it's borked. I'll crack the case open later and wiggle everything. If it's the HDD, is it worth getting a SSD for the OS and a replacement spinner for storage, or is this PC not worth the effort?
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Yamaha XJ600 | Yamaha YZF600R Thundercat | KTM 990 SMT | BMW F900XR TE

[weasley]

.... and a system test of the HD reveals it's knackered, leading eventually to a I/O error, no access to C:

Mac Mini worth it?
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Yamaha XJ600 | Yamaha YZF600R Thundercat | KTM 990 SMT | BMW F900XR TE

[prawny1]

I would replace the data cable first or swap of another drive then remove all but the boot drive and try f8 to safemode and doing a system restore.
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hellkat wrote:

Some people are only alive cos its against the law to kill them.

[Confusion]

[weasley]

Thanks for the continuing advice. Latest update is that I tried a different SATA cable for the HD... no change. Tried a different SATA port on the mobo... no change. I even tried a different power cable to the HD (even though it is spinning up ok)... no change.

When I enter the BIOS settings it appears to know that it should boot from an identified SATA drive, but shows it as "disabled".

The boot sequence gets as far as the "Starting Windows..." image, with the animated Windows logo, then stalls and goes to the recovery page.

The HDD appears to spin up normally and do the read/write 'grind' during the boot sequence.

I'll have a crack at the suggestion above and see how it goes... at least I may be able to rule the HDD or mobo in/out.
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Yamaha XJ600 | Yamaha YZF600R Thundercat | KTM 990 SMT | BMW F900XR TE

[raak]

[prawny1]

try changing the hdd/ sata mode in the bios between ide and ahci .

Windows will generally bluescreen during start up if the mode has changed as it doesn't like booting ahci unless it was setup that wau initially and vise versa.

The sata mode can sometimes change if the bios resets from a power cut or something.
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hellkat wrote:

Some people are only alive cos its against the law to kill them.

[weasley]

OK, so I haven't managed to get a bootable CD sorted yet, but in the mean time:

- I created a Windows repair CD from another computer and tried to use this - it got part way through the startup repair sequence then got to "attempting to repair disk errors - this could take over an hour". Six hours later it was still attempting to repair disc errors, so I stopped it.

- This morning I got access to a HD cradle attached to a laptop via eSATA. When mounted, Windows spotted the disk straight away and loaded its driver. It then took an age to address the full disc, finally returning an error - unable to access the main partition (although it was able to access the small OS partition labelled "Recovery"). Windows' built-in partition manager observed that the main partition needed to be formatted before it could be used.

So, one way or another, the HD is messed up and easy data retrieval is unlikely (I guess some special utility may be able to get at it?). Pretty much anything important is backed up to another external HD.

I am tempted to try a small SSD for the OS and another HD for storage, to get the thing up and running again, and then maybe take some time to see if I can recover the old HD. At least I know now it is the disk that is screwed - our village's power supply is not the best and we have had a few 'blips' recently so maybe this has knocked it out (the PC did tend to get left running all the time because of the long boot time).

Somewhere I have an older PC with an aftermarket graphics card which I was also planning on putting in it (currently it has on-board ATI Radeon HD3200 graphics). If I am messing inside it, anything else I could think about upgrading? It has a AMD Athlon 64 bit processor (single core), but I was running 32-bit Windows 7 Home Premium. There is 4 GB of memory in it already (2x2GB). Other than that there was the 1TB HD, a multi-media card reader and a DVD RW drive. All graphics and sound is on-board.

The case has a lot of empty space and ports: PCIe x16, PCIe x1, PCI, 4x SATA ports. Motherboard is a Dell F896N 0896N, if that matters.

Or is the money better spent on a new build?
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Yamaha XJ600 | Yamaha YZF600R Thundercat | KTM 990 SMT | BMW F900XR TE

[chris-red]

Are you really attached to it? You could get a refurbed machine with a much better spec for ~£100. Personally I wouldn't waste time on it.

I think the single core processor is a much bigger bottleneck than the disk. If you do want to to upgrade it get a better processor first.
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