Dead laptop

[Interpol Shrimper]

Can any of the IT experts on here offer me an opinion on what to do with my dead laptop please?

Typically, I've been saying for weeks I MUST backup the photos/music etc onto a separate storage drive & I was going to do it yesterday (honestly!!!) but at about 6ish on Saturday night my Dell Inspiron 1501 decided to die.

It now doesn't even boot up & about 30 seconds after switching it on I get an error message saying "PXE-E61 Media Test Failure - check cable"

I've managed to run some simple diagnostics on it and it comes up with some kind of hard-drive error. I also did a simple Google search on that error via my phone internet & it seems to be a common fault/problem. One potential fix was to try & alter the order that the PC tries to boot up Windows in but again I'm unsure how to do this. One of my mates has also suggested trying to reinstall Windows XP and then get hold of a copy of PC Tools File Recovery as it can do a deep scan and recover various filetypes even if Windows has been reinstalled.

Any help/advice much appreciated and there's a least a beer in it next time I'm down for your trouble.

 

[Firestorm]

Boot order is in the bios, the F button the hit is normally displayed breifly when you start the PC

 

[Interpol Shrimper]

Boot order is in the bios, the F button the hit is normally displayed breifly when you start the PC

It seems to lock up though so I can't easily change it (I am guessing this is because it gets to around the same amount of time when it locks up trying to boot Windows).

 

[MK Shrimper]

What I can see from Geek forums, is that your CMOS battery has died, therefore erasing all your BIOS settings. As Gary as said, reset your BIOS settings, back up what you need asap, then open up the laptop and replace the battery.

What you have seems to be is the lappy is trying to boot from the network first rather than the hard drive.

 

[Interpol Shrimper]

I should also add perhaps that my battery is also rather sh@gged & we've been running it for the past year purely on the power cable. Think it died so quickly as nobody told us we should not have the battery in when the power cable was in too. When this happened last year I did some research and found that Dell seemingly install a process in the machine that if you don't buy a new battery it scrambles the output from your keyboard!

I have about 10 minutes battery life if I don't use the power cable!

 

[MK Shrimper]

I should also add perhaps that my battery is also rather sh@gged & we've been running it for the past year purely on the power cable. Think it died so quickly as nobody told us we should not have the battery in when the power cable was in too. When this happened last year I did some research and found that Dell seemingly install a process in the machine that if you don't buy a new battery it scrambles the output from your keyboard!

I have about 10 minutes battery life if I don't use the power cable!

Doubt that's got anything to do with it, and the latter sounds like paranoia! Your CMOS is a small lithium cell inside your PC, like a watch battery.

 

[Interpol Shrimper]

Doubt that's got anything to do with it, and the latter sounds like paranoia! Your CMOS is a small lithium cell inside your PC, like a watch battery.

It's not paranoia, honestly if you have the battery installed it scrambles or at the very least slows don't to a crawl the output of what you type!

So, basically then my hard-drive should be accessible if get the CMOS sorted?

 

[MK Shrimper]

It's not paranoia, honestly if you have the battery installed it scrambles or at the very least slows don't to a crawl the output of what you type!

So, basically then my hard-drive should be accessible if get the CMOS sorted?

If you can access the BIOS and alter settings you should be able to do it without changing the battery - however it wont save the new settings and you'll have to do it everytime you start up the PC, so get yer stuff off first THEN change the battery.