Hi:
I have a Dell Inspiron 1525 that started with the Black Screen of Death - just a black screen with a movable cursor. Would not boot into Safe Mode. I tried a restore from the Vista CD but it said no restore points were found, but I know System Restore was on before all of this happened.
I tried hitting F8 because according to the Dell manual that was supposed to give me the option of restoring the hard drive to the factory image, but that never came up as an option like the Dell Manual said it would.
I reformatted the hard drive and tried to do the PCRestore from the Vista CD using the instructions on the Dell site about how to do this. I did a CHKDSK on the D: recovery partition that has the factory image on it and it is fine according to CHKDSK. I ran PCRestore from the Vista CD but this did not result in a bootable HD. When I reboot, it attempts a repair and says the System Volume is corrupt and will be repaired, but on reboot, I get the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).
When I boot from the Vista CD and try to do a repair, it attempts a repair, does CHKDSK and finds nothing wrong with the disk, says it wants to add the Windows Preinstallation Environment to the D: (recovery) partition (I haven't let it do this yet because I wasn't sure if I should mess with the D: recovery partition).
I have reformatted 5 times and tried to do a clean installation of Vista from the Vista CD. 3/5 attempts the installation fails at the setup phase. The 2 times it worked, it ran incredibly slow and I tried installing the Dell drivers from the drivers and utilities CD and it appears to work but the wireless chip doesn't work. And when I reboot, back to the black screen of death.
I did a memory diagnostic test twice and it said no problems were found both times but that I would get a log or read out (something like that) when I rebooted, but it wouldn't reboot to Vista. The only thing I can do is boot from the Vista CD and get a DOS prompt.
I don't think this is a hard drive problem since CHKDSK reports 0 bad sectors and I can reformat fine. I think this may be a memory problem. But why doesn't the memory test detect the memory problem?
Any help is appreciated.
I have a Dell Inspiron 1525 that started with the Black Screen of Death - just a black screen with a movable cursor. Would not boot into Safe Mode. I tried a restore from the Vista CD but it said no restore points were found, but I know System Restore was on before all of this happened.
I tried hitting F8 because according to the Dell manual that was supposed to give me the option of restoring the hard drive to the factory image, but that never came up as an option like the Dell Manual said it would.
I reformatted the hard drive and tried to do the PCRestore from the Vista CD using the instructions on the Dell site about how to do this. I did a CHKDSK on the D: recovery partition that has the factory image on it and it is fine according to CHKDSK. I ran PCRestore from the Vista CD but this did not result in a bootable HD. When I reboot, it attempts a repair and says the System Volume is corrupt and will be repaired, but on reboot, I get the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).
When I boot from the Vista CD and try to do a repair, it attempts a repair, does CHKDSK and finds nothing wrong with the disk, says it wants to add the Windows Preinstallation Environment to the D: (recovery) partition (I haven't let it do this yet because I wasn't sure if I should mess with the D: recovery partition).
I have reformatted 5 times and tried to do a clean installation of Vista from the Vista CD. 3/5 attempts the installation fails at the setup phase. The 2 times it worked, it ran incredibly slow and I tried installing the Dell drivers from the drivers and utilities CD and it appears to work but the wireless chip doesn't work. And when I reboot, back to the black screen of death.
I did a memory diagnostic test twice and it said no problems were found both times but that I would get a log or read out (something like that) when I rebooted, but it wouldn't reboot to Vista. The only thing I can do is boot from the Vista CD and get a DOS prompt.
I don't think this is a hard drive problem since CHKDSK reports 0 bad sectors and I can reformat fine. I think this may be a memory problem. But why doesn't the memory test detect the memory problem?
Any help is appreciated.
