I installed ram in my Inspirion 1505 and now I am getting a 'invalid partition table' error.

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bcall

bcall

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Jan 19, 2014
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My computer is running 32bit Vista. A friend of mine was throwing out his old notebook and let me have it. My machine had 2 512mb ram cards in it and his had the 2GB cards. His was in no condition to be reassembling so I thought I would just pop them in mine since they should be better. I am now getting an 'invalid partition table' error.

I booted from the disk and ran diagnostics, and it found an error that says the 'boot manager is corrupt'. I've done some searching on here and none of the fixes I saw listed worked. I am not very good with DOS, but I tried the one fix that suggested that I type 'bootsec/fixboot' in the command prompt line, but I couldn't get it to recognize the command.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!
 
Solution
bcall
Ok. So I tried running chkdsk and it said the drive was in use and it asked if I wanted to force dismount it to allow the check. Not knowing what I was doing exactly, I thought it might be wise to confirm what I should be doing. Thanks for sticking with me. I appreciate the help.
Also, I did reinstall Vista Home premium, but that didn't help either. It boots up as far as the black screen with the blinking cursor in the upper left hand corner and stops. It is showing 2 different OS options on the list when I boot from the disk though.
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bcall

bcall

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Jan 19, 2014
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Sorry I didn't mention that, but I didn't want to ramble on all day right out of the gate. It won't even power up all the way with the original ram in it. Nothing ever shows up on the screen.
 
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DiaSin

DiaSin

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Feb 7, 2013
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My guess is that the original system was DDR2 and the new ram is DDR3 and you damaged something when it tried to boot with the wrong memory. Try reformatting and installing windows fresh, see if that works.
 
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bcall

bcall

Honorable
Jan 19, 2014
5
0
10,520
Ok. So I tried running chkdsk and it said the drive was in use and it asked if I wanted to force dismount it to allow the check. Not knowing what I was doing exactly, I thought it might be wise to confirm what I should be doing. Thanks for sticking with me. I appreciate the help.
Also, I did reinstall Vista Home premium, but that didn't help either. It boots up as far as the black screen with the blinking cursor in the upper left hand corner and stops. It is showing 2 different OS options on the list when I boot from the disk though.
 
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Solution
bcall

bcall

Honorable
Jan 19, 2014
5
0
10,520
Update. ...I got it to boot! It seems the OS partition was not selected as the active partition. I selected the f: drive with my OS on it and it booted right up. (After about half an hour of finishing the install anyway) Now I have my upgraded RAM installed and a fresh OS (even if it is Vista). Hopefully it will cure the bugs it had while booting before too. Thanks for everyone's input! Glad to be a part of the community.
 
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