just to let you know my problems with bios and cmos having bad checksum and rebooting when it likes was down to the motherboard,
temp a bit high i think 39 C and 50 C under full load,run prime 95 for 20 hours,
it is overclocked to 2400 and is stable,i have a zalman cpu cooler.

steve

I have a Dell Inspiron 8200 Laptop and yesterday whilst using it developed a fault.
Firstly the screen froze in the middle of typing an email.
Had to remove the power to close Laptop down.
Rebooted, but took long time to start up.

Left the laptop running, but when I returned - the "Windows XP start up " screen was shown and had frozen. (assume laptop had rebooted itself whatever the reason - Microsoft updates perhaps).

Tried rebooting (after removing power) but just got a blank screen.
Tried another reboot but failed to start.

Symptoms getting now: Switch on - the power LED and Hard Drive LED light up for about 8 seconds and then the Laptop dies.

(Have tried it without floppy disc drive and hard drive fitted, but same conditions on start up - ie tries to start but 8 seconds later packs up).

Any idea what might be causing the problem?

Hi Timeliner how are you?

It sounds to me like a memory or motherboard problem, although it could be the hard disk.

Try removing the power lead and the battery for a few minutes, it sometimes helps.

Can you get into the BIOS setup screen? If so try reloading the defaults, but make a note of your current settings first. Also, is the BIOS clock showing the right time? If not then it could be the BIOS battery.

The other thing to try is removing some of the RAM to see if that makes any difference, but first I would try booting from a CD, either the Win XP installation disk or better still a Live Linux disk. If it runs OK from the CD then it points to your hard disk.

Let me know how you get on.

I am fine (will email you later).

Have tried the powerlead/battery removal - no change.

The screen is blank. Also have tried booting from the Utilities CD which came with the laptop but once again no joy.

When I switch it on, the leds light up, the CD gives the impression of starting, and I can hear the harddrive start up - but the cooling fans at the rear of the case aren't rotating and within 8 seconds it dies.

Will try removing some of the ram later (have to go out shortly!).

Timeliner

Assuming that the cooling fans are not jammed with dust, it points towards a motherboard, graphics or memory fault that is stopping the initial boot routine. Try the memory, as it could be as simple as something not sitting in it's socket correctly. The problem is that if you try poking around inside a laptop, you can do more harm than good.

Removed the memory and swopped the modules over.
That sorted out the problem.

Thanks for your help.

(I have sent an email to you - assuming your email is the same as previous - if you don't receive it let me know on here).

I've added an external drive via a USB port (Seagate. Drive G:) and everything seems to work fine. However my PC won't boot up with it powered. I get an error message after the PC does its Scanning Devices routine "Error Loading OS". If I switch off the ext drive and boot up & then power up the drive everything is fine.

Bolshi

Are you powering the drive from a single USB port?

USB drives draw close to or above the maximum that the USB ports can supply. The solutions are to get a powered USB hub, an external power supply for your USB disc or an adaptor cable that takes the power from 2 USB ports.

I favour an external solution, as taking more power from your motherboard can never be good for it although in most cases should not do harm.

Optimist. The power is from a separate xformer/mains.

Bolshi

So much for that theory then :-(

In that case it is possibly a problem with the MB - try swapping to a different USB (remember that most computers have two USB sockets for each driver). The other thing to try is flash the BIOS with the latest version.

Optimist: Thanks for your time.

Swapped with another USB - no difference.

"Flash the Bios with the latest version" Oooer mother! Sounds complicated. How would I do it?

It seems strange that the drive is recognised after start up and copies, retrieves etc without problem. Is the drive being recognised at start up do you think?

Bolshi

To flash the BIOS, you need to go to the manufacturers website, identify your motherboard, and follow the instructions EXACTLY.

I have never got into trouble doing this, but it does come with a massive PC health warning.

Another thing that occurrs to me, is that if you have a modern machine, then there may be an option in the BIOS to boot from a USB drive. If it exists, dissable it.

Optimist.
I will have a look at the manufactureers web site as you recommend.

BIOS option. One of my reasons for adding the external drive (plus Acronis True Image software) was to allow the machine to be booted up if my existing hard drive was totally screwed. If I disable this feature would that in turn not let me do what I originally planned?

I take it that the error message I get (Error Loading OS) refers to the operating system? Is my machine trying to load from G drive instead of C?

Thanks again for your trouble.

My daughter is interested in purchasing an external hard drive for backup purposes. It will be for storing all sorts of data, particularly doc, xls, jpg, gif, mp3, etc, types of files and importantly, also OE e-mail backup.

Can somone point me towards a well written site that deals with OE Backup in a fairly generic 'dbx files, etc' type of way, as I would like to point her towards it.

I've got a feeling, Doc, that you can't backup OE messages. You can backup your address book, etc., but not the messages.

I think you need Outlook 2k3 to be able to backup the messages (edit: which you do using a .pst file).

I'll now take a seat while everyone corrects me.

:o)

Bollshi

Yes it sounds as though it is trying to load from the USB drive.

It sounds as if it could be an Acronis setup problem. What have you transfered to the disk. I'm guessing that Acronis will store a compressed image of your disk which would not be bootable, and installs it's own bootable OS on the disk for use in recovery operations. Is that the way it should work, and have you set Acronis up correctly. It looks to be a well thought out piece of software so I would expect it to have some sort of verification routine.

You can back up OE messages. File, Export, messages.

There is also a directory with a very long name that holds the messages. You can backup the files in the diectory. I used to do it every day to rewritable CDs. There are a number of .dbx files in the directory.

C:\Documents and Settings\rg105064\Local Settings\Application Data\Identities\\Microsoft\Outlook Express

or

http://www.iopus.com/guides/oe-backup.htm

hilary

I think in OE the messages are stored as .dbx files.

The sort of site I am looking for is sorta kinda like these two, sorta kinda:-

http://www.sitedeveloper.ws/tutorials/outlook.htm

http://www.insideoutlookexpress.com/backup/simple.htm

Optimist. I was waiting to get the disk working properly before installing Acronis.
I have installed it now and used a facilty to install a new hard disk. I've changed the original ext file format from Fat32 to Ntms to mimic my C drive. Same sort of problem but with a new twist. When booting up I don't get the error message but it just hangs there with a flashing "_" . Again when I switch off the drive and re-boot everything is hunky dory. I've sent Seagate a request for assistance to see what they have to say.

Edit. I think I must solve this problem before loading mirror images of my drives using Acronis or else I could be storing up trouble for myself.