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Dell M4400 HD encryption

Discussion in 'Dell Latitude, Vostro, and Precision' started by cytocycle, Dec 9, 2008.

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  1. cytocycle

    cytocycle Newbie

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    So here is the complex problem with a Dell M4400 with XP with Quadcore.
    Laptop was attached to another employees dockingstation which had a maxtor USB drive. M4400 locked up, will not boot OS now, hangs on Intel storage driver or blank screen when switched to just SATA in bios. Was running A06, flashed with USB boot drive to A09 no help there.
    Try to boot XP Sp3 cd to do a recovery, but it just goes blank after flashing up "Setup is inspecting your...." to black screen HD icon doesn't move and Cap Locks will not light so the laptop seems braindead.

    Call Dell twice... we can run the diagnostics and they are fine and Dell says that is on the HD. The Sata HD test pass of course. I booted Knoppix from CD rom and saw the data partition but there are no files.

    This is where it gets complex. We have the fingerprint reader option on the laptop and you have to use it to boot the Hardware even to get into the bios, and then again when the OS comes up. The OS is not coming up and even if we do the first fingerprint the OS driver appears to be empty... Dell said this option encrypts the HD even though we didn't select Encrypt HD in the bios.

    I can't boot the XP SP3 cd to run recovery to rebuild the MBR, I don't have access to an XP box to build a bootable USB drive so we can run this, and I've tried a ton of the USB boot programs but they all want DOS source files which I can't find. Will FIXMBR even work?:confused:

    Please help, We can't wait for Dell onsite to get this machine back up and running as it's our main developers box.
     
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