Dell Vista Desktop Won't Boot?

Question

My mom has a Dell Vista desktop computer.

When trying to boot, it turns on and shows the Dell logo as the computer loads and turns on. Then it goes only to a blinking cursor in the left hand side. I know this means the harddrive may be bad, or that there is a corruption somewhere in the boot.

I would like to look at BIOs and see if the harddrive is working correctly. I know that your access it while it is booting. F12 pulls up a Boot Menu, and F2 pulls up the BIOS.

Where can I look to find out if the harddrive is working? I pulled up BIOS. It has a Main screen, and one for Advanced, Power, Boot, Exit.

Also, if anyone knows what may be wrong?

Answer 1

If you can get into the BIOS, on the mainscreen you should see listings for SATA drives (or IDE) on the left of the screen. If your computer is recognizing an actual drive there should be information about the drive on the right like in this screen shot:

http://techpaul.wordpress.com/2007/08/03/how-to-boot-from-a-cd/

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19365975.aspx



If the BIOS can't see a drive you will see this:



[NONE]

Answer 2

Meghan it sounds like you have a corrupt MBR (Master Boot Record) which means you will need to reinstall your operating system (Vista)



Vista is old and well passed it's sell by date. You need to bring your Dell up to date with a March 2011 operating system, Windows is not the only operating system in the world, Dell support other FREE operating systems which you need to look into. which are faster more secure and stable they don't crash, or get windows Viruses. You get the operating system and all the application software that you will ever need for FREE and you will always be kept up to date



Dell support Ubuntu Linux, though I would not recommend that to you There are better Linux distributions available that work out of the box



check these out you cant't get more upto date than this these are cutting edge technology operating systems

OpenSuse 11.4 Released today March 10th 2011

Fedora 15 Released Tuesday March 8th 2011

check them out here

http://distrowatch.com/

Answer 3

as long as that computer has better than 1GB of RAM, a adequate troublesomechronic, and a twin center processor, then it may artwork wonderful. only be sure you already know all of the areas of that workstation for while it comes time to locate Vista drivers on your new OS setting up.