Laptop suddenly stopped working and now get PXE error?

Robert McAllister

Honorable
Jul 31, 2013
1
0
10,510
OK so I was downloading music to my external hard drive and then putting it onto iTunes. Later that night I turned off my laptop and went to bed, waking up in the morning with a "pxe-e61 media test failure check cable pxe-mof exiting pxe rom" error. Now, I've Googled it and it seems its something to do with my hard drive or my network. However I cannot do anything in BIOS and the Dell diagnostics told me that there was no hard drive. The most confusing thing about all of this though is that my laptop will work eventually. It could be after one attempt of restarting or 50 but it always eventually comes on, and when it does everything is fine and I can do everything I could do previously (as far as I know at least).

Here's generally what happens:
I turn on the laptop
The dell startup screen is trying to load, but stops about 30% and then freezes making clicking noises
It then goes to 100% and the black screen with errors comes up
I keep turning it off and on and eventually it will just go straight to the windows loadin screen
Sometimes though I will turn it on, the error message will come up and it will go straight to the windows loading screen afterwards.

Does anyone know exactly what's wrong with my laptop and how to fix it? It's a year old windows 7 dell i5 if that helps.
 
Solution
You laptop is trying a PXE (network) boot when it cannot find the OS on the local disk. It indicates a bootloader problem, which can usually be fixed by inserting your system repair CD or install DVD at startup unless your HDD is dying.

RealBeast

Titan
Moderator
You laptop is trying a PXE (network) boot when it cannot find the OS on the local disk. It indicates a bootloader problem, which can usually be fixed by inserting your system repair CD or install DVD at startup unless your HDD is dying.
 
Solution