Wont Boot Past Dell Splash Screen

alexjk620

Reputable
May 28, 2014
2
0
4,510
Hello, I have a Dell laptop a coworker asked me to look at. I'm no computer genius, but I can handle some small stuff. The laptop won't boot past the dell screen and won't let me access the bios or boot settings. Someone suggested the ACPI but I wouldn't know the first thing to do for that. My coworker has left it on the boot screen for over a couple hours without any change. I decided to take out the hard drive to see how it'd boot. The laptop actually went all the way through the loading screen and gave me the missing hard drive error. I tried again and it let me access the bios and boot settings. I don't think it could be the hard drive error, but it would be nice if it was that simple. As far as I know, the hard drive has never given any errors before and it just seems like it should give me a missing hard drive error. I appreciate any help with this!
 
If you can post and then get a missing hdd error, I would take that as the culprit.

If you have another laptop sitting around, just put its hdd and see if it posts, even if you get a OS crash during boot, you know the laptop is ok.

If not, try booting of a DVD, doesn't matter if Windows or Linux
 

alexjk620

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May 28, 2014
2
0
4,510
Thanks! It just seems so weird to me because anytime I've seen a hard drive fail, it just didn't recognize it. It never prevented me from passing the boot screen before. I have a few hard drives laying around somewhere I can try out today. I was also thinking of testing to see if I can boot ubuntu from the drive. Thanks again for the reply! I will post if it works. Hopefully it does =).
 

Eris Jonathan

Reputable
Nov 7, 2014
1
0
4,510
I have the same problem, but with bios access, no missing hdd message, but it looping on the splash screen after it showing white underscore flashing. I cant fix this, please help. thank you