Laptop will not boot to Win XP

[dek001]

My Dell laptop, running win xp (pro), was running fine when I was going to make a CD using Roxio Easy Media Creator. When I tried to start the program, it came up with "trial period ended". This program is the full program and not a trial or partial program. This has happened before on my desktop and I unloaded and reloaded the program with no problems. This time, with the laptop, I unloaded the program and was told to exit the drag to disk function, which I did. The program was then unloaded. I then proceeded to unload the drag to disk function. I was then instructed to reboot the computer now or later. I chose later. I then exited the control panel and proceeded to reboot. At reboot, it powered-up and then the screen indicated a problem and offered several methods to continue such as continue to boot in the normal method, safe or to a recover. None of them would work and the computer continued to reboot with the same offerings continuously. I tried to boot with a bootable disk to try and recover but it won't let me do that and will not boot off the disk. It just goes back to that same error selection. I even tried to get into my system setup but it was frozen and would not let me in. WHAT IS HAPPENING? And, from the looks of preceding posts, I'm not alone. My computer is a Dell 8100. Thanks, Dennis

 

[lhuegele]

If your Dell is not very old and still under warranty, you should contact Dell Technical Support. They should be able to help you out.

Personally it sounds to me like Roxio (or some malware attached to it) might have messed up your registry during the uninstall procedures.

Have you tried to do a system restore yet? If you reboot to safe-mode then run system restore, you should be able to restore your computer back to a point in time before you had the problem.

Good luck,

 

[dek001]

Computer has been out of warranty for several years. Can't get anything to boot at all. It just continues through the same series of offers and only reboots to same. I put the Win CD bootable disk in and it is not recognized. I can't even get into the BIOS. I'm probably going to pull the HD save my files and try to reformat. Thanks, Dennis

 

[gb0mb]

You should be able to get to the bios no matter what is on your hard drive, you actually don't even need a hard drive to get to the bios.

If you can get to the windows promt for safe, normal, ect.. boot you have made it past the bios.

If you are making it past the bios just hit F12 while you are booting to get the dell boot menu and select cd rom to boot.

I think F12 has been the standard for boot menu option on dells for a while. You could try F2 right when you boot to get into bios setup.

Gb0mb

........99.9% User Error........
Ubuntu -- African for I can't install Gentoo

 

[greyted]

As Gb0mb states, F2 will (should) enable you to enter the bios.

Below is a link to Dell, think it is correct for your laptop, if not then enter the correct Tag number and you will have all the drivers and various help pages.

Dell






"There's terrific merit in having no sense of humour, no sense of irony, practically no sense of anything at all. If you're born with these so-called defects you have a very good chance of getting to the top."

Peter Cook

 

[dek001]

Thanks. I'll try it. Dennis