Member Avatar for jsmerdy

I dropped my inspiron 1150 (windows xp home, pentium 4), and after much fiddling with it and a $40 call to Dell, ended up needing a new hard drive. Before I installed the new drive, on boot up it would go to the Dell logo, and even let me reinstall Win XP, but only partially, it would freeze at a certain point and not go further.

Now I have the new hard drive (80G) and when I go to boot it from CD in order to reinstall the OS, it goes straight to a black screen with a curser, I don't even get the Dell Logo. I have tried pressing F12, that doesn't work. Even though there's a cursor displayed, no text comes up when I type.

One more thing...when I first had the new hard drive installed, after that the power cord wouldn't work and so I had to replace the little thing inside that the cord plugs into.

Thanks for your help!

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by Greg_z
Member Avatar for DarlingNikki

I worked for Microsoft support and had to deal with Dell quite frequently, not the best of times. They always result to saying something to do with needing a new hard drive after an hour of money and time wasted describing and troubleshooting. It sounds like there is a problem with your software and that one of its files may be corrupted or missing. Ask Dell to send you out a new Windows XP disc, and try that before doing anything else. They will send this to you for free. Sometimes after having these discs for a while, or after a one time use, files become corrupted or the disc is damaged.

Good Luck!

Member Avatar for anh.le.5076798

you can press f2 for setting up the bios, than in the boot menu tab , using spacebar for checking boot 1st ( will be yellow ), restart laptop , it's ok

Edited by anh.le.5076798
Member Avatar for Greg_z

anh.le.5076798. this is a dead post from over five years ago.

Edited by Greg_z
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