The laptop was working fine all day but then all of a sudden when I had to reboot it, the only that would come up is the dell media direct and that wont load because its telling me it cant find the drive. I tried to put in a XP disk that I have and it wont boot to that either even with the correct boot order in the BIOS. I tried to do a restore and that still didnt work, when I go into F8 it gives me the choices but its telling me that its Windows XP embedded when its windows vista. Is there a way I can get this to work, I dont care about reformatting it because I hate Vista anyways, but I dont want to spend the money on a brand new drive.
P.S I dont have the discs with me, wasnt able to find them ever since we moved.
Thank YOu
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You could try running the diagnostics to check whether the HDD is kaput. When powering on the machine, press the Fn button at the same time as the power button and then release both buttons. I don't think things are looking favourable at the moment though.
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I will try that and see if it works. Also, I am able to hook up the drive using an adaptor and everything seems fine, can I delete the partition for the media direct?
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I doubt it will make any difference. If you can see the drive via an external connector then it's probably ok, I suspect the boot sector is dodgy though; not something you'd be able to necessarily tell just by looking at the folders via an external connector. Have you tried running chkdsk on it?
If you had the Vista media you could probably chose repair and it would fix it if that's the case - not sure how you'd do it otherwise. -
I ran the diagnostics and it found no issue, but this morning after taking what I needed off the drive I deleted the partition for the dell media direct and it booted up fine. I am going to change it to XP now i really dont like Vista, I was just wondering when I was trying to boot it up from the Windows disk there was no selection to boot off the USB dvd drive that I have hooked up, would it still boot even if I have the correct boot sequence in the BIOS?
P.S Thanks for your help -
I can't remember which button it is you have to press, but when at the Dell screen before booting into your OS, it says press something for setup and something else for boot options. Push that something else. On my Inspiron it's F12. You should then be able to choose what to boot from, regardless of sequence set in the BIOS. However, if you've disabled booting from a device at all then you'll need to alter the BIOS so that it's no longer disabled.
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When you hit F12 it comes up with the screen but there is no boot from USB, I checked the BIOs to see if there is a setting in there but I wasnt able to find anything, USB Emulation is On and the USB device is enabled, I also know this is a good XP because I used it multiple times before, is there a setting somewhere to tell the computer to boot off USB. The reason im using the external DVD is because the internal DVD drive doesnt work anymore, it went bad 2 weeks after the warranty expired and I just hadnt had the time to order a new one.
Anything would be much appreciated
Thanks for all your help Fragilexx -
OK I just tried to boot from an external USB driven optical drive and I couldn't do it either; I know I have been able to do it with some notebooks but doesn't look like I can with this one. Bizarre.
Anyway, do not dispair. If you have a spare USB flash drive that's big enough or an external USB HDD then you can make this bootable with the installation media on. For info follow this link: http://www.pctipsbox.com/installing-windows-xp-using-a-usb-flash-drive/
Dell Inspiron 1525 wont boot
Discussion in 'Dell' started by Dkloss28, Sep 7, 2009.