Dell cannot boot, not even with a CD

OK, I've pulled out most of my hair by now!

Breathe... breathe...

OK, I'm back.

A client asked me to look at his *extremely* slow Dell Dimension 8200
desktop. I noticed that the 120GB hard drive had about 1GB of free
sapce! After copying 60GB of photos to an external hard drive and then
deleting the files to get some breathing room, I rebooted to see how
things were.

Definite improvement. Of course McAfee wouldn't shut up (I told him
there are far better AV progs available) and the PC hung. Mouse and
keyboard locked up. I couldn't do anything. I pushed in the power
button since there was no other way to reboot.

That's when the problems started. PC won't boot in Regular Mode. The
loading bar stops moving and freezes. Can't boot using LKGC. When
choosing Safe Mode or Safe Mode with Command Prompt, PC freezes while
loading agp440.sys. When I boot off an XP installation CD, that
freezes at the "Setup is Starting Windows XP" message.

Dell diagnostics doesn't show a bad hard drive. Could the mobo have
been damaged?

Help!

 

Why don't you do a disk and do a complete diagnostic? This will give you and
idea of whether or not it is problem. Look at the motherboard and see if
there are any bulging caps. As far as I know this wasn't a problem typically
in 8200's, but in the Optiplex 270's it is/was a rampant problem.
Unfortunately, you may have run into a "coincidental" problem. They exist
and no matter what you do it is hard to get someone to believe that "you"
didn't do it. Good luck.

Gregg

 

VirtuaGirl2 is an online stripper porn site. it connects up and sticks a
stripper on the desktop. Personally I would casually mention this while
the wife is nearby....

Sounds like these two really need some lessons on safe computing.
I'm betting they have ALL the automatic updates and such set up as well.

I would strip the machine down and clean it, then flush the drive and
reload. Ask them exactly what they use it for and set it up according to
that.

 

Hi!

Yes, you are working around a problem somewhere. I've been working on
a Dim8250 recently and found none of the problems you were talking
about when I went to reload a fresh copy of Windows onto a blank hard
drive for testing purposes.

The installation just worked, and it worked fine from the owner's
installation media.

One of my brothers had that quite a long time ago, and he ended up
getting a BIG surprise on his telephone bill. His connection at the
time was dial-up, and without his knowledge (or maybe even with it,
considering...no, wait, that rant is going to be way off topic), it
was switched to a premium rate number going to somewhere outside of
the US.

I think you'd do really well to not go back there. It sounds like the
whole thing is just one mess after another.

William