Durn, that really sucks. MY Dell com­puter, named Jackie, is still run­ning. The only thing I know that’s wrong is that whenever you turn it off, there’s a stu­pid blue screen of DEATH. Though, if it has any more prob­lems, I might not know. My brother has taken Jackie over, and I’m stuck with a broken laptop.

Yeah… From what I know, Dell is known for stu­pid computers.

Unfor­tu­nately, I know too little about com­puters to really help. But it looks like there’s some­thing wrong with the hard drive. That the com­puter can’t sense it. Maybe some­thing happened to it? Doesn’t the F2 run the… BIOS? I’d check that.

Errgh. D:

When press­ing f2 (when its throw­ing a wobbly) and hav­ing a look at the setup util­ity, it doesn’t recod­nise my HDD as being there… But just now, it DID recog­nise it and booted…maybe the con­nec­tion is iffy?? Any thoughts anyone?

My Dell, Meta­tron, is about 3 months old and has recently start to freak out. A couple of images do this weird fuzzy think until I shut Fire­fox down.. I thought it was an inter­net error… until the fuzzy image thing star­ted on my com­puter itself. So, then I was like.. WTF… And that’s my story.

Other than that, I’m clue­less as always.

i’d tell Dell that the hard disk is very inter­mit­tent, and you want it chan­ging. have you run up the Dell Diagnostics?

I’m fairly sure that if you hit F12 as it boots it might give access to the dia­gnostic par­ti­tion. All of ours have it — point­less for me though as I image the drives and oblit­er­ate it.

Fail­ing that, go to support.euro.dell.com, give it your asset tag, and down­load a copy of the dia­gnostics test kit.

And don’t let them give you any crap. They excel in crap. I’ve now has 20 PSUs expire out of 70 machines in one batch — Dell say “isol­ated instances”. Only 2 ser­vice per­son­ell have admit­ted that Dell has had 2 product recalls on PSUs recently..and that was when I lied and said “We were told there was an issue with these machines”.

I also had a mother­board expire 3 weeks ago. What do I get? “Are you able to fit them your­self, or should we send out an engin­eer?”. I just laugh and say “no, I’m used to it..I can rebuild them with my eyes shut”.

Reas­on­able machinery, but a lot of qual­ity issues in the recent ones it seems. GX240 — good. GX150 — good. GX110-good. GX60-pants, along with the high end Pre­ci­sion 360 CAD sta­tions. SX240/SX260 seem to have the same issues as the GX60s with regard to PSUs.

I really wouldn’t mind — IF they admit­ted it was their prob­lem. I do object to being blatantly lied to though, espe­cially when we’re pay­ing for a ser­vice contract!

Ooh. Actu­ally, look on the back panel when it boots…you should have 4 LEDs marked a,b,c,d. Note the col­ours of each when it fails, and look it up or e-mail me with the codes and your ser­vice tag, and I’ll have a poke around Dells site..

in fact…if you haven’t done so already…

^[2]

^[3]

Oh boy. This is a hard drive prob­lem. PBR stands for Par­ti­tion Boot Record and it’s where the hard­ware looks when hand­ing con­trol over to the oper­at­ing system.

Either your hard disk is toast (which I doubt since when it does boot you have access to all your stuff) or you simply have a cor­rupt PBR.

Assum­ing you have only one partition:

The PBR is syn­onym­ous with the MBR, so you can either pop in your Win­dows CD, boot to com­man prompt and use the FIXMBR com­mand, rewrite the MBR your­self using DISKPART (but I wouldn’t recom­mend this unless you know what you’re doing!). Oth­er­wise you have to get all old-school and boot using a diskette or CD with FDISK on it and type “fdisk /mbr”.

before doing so, check the mod­er­a­tion entry with the URLS dir­ect to the dell tech posts..just for troubleshoot­ings sake. Seems quite common..

Thank you in advance to Karl and Lew …

I’ll have a read of all the links/advice you’ve given and then form some sort of “Plan of Action”.

I heard back from Dell at the crack of dawn this morn­ing (bas­tard Indian call-centre in bloody Ban­galore no less :roll: ) and arranged for them to call back at mid­day. I sat for over an hour at my com­puter, wait­ing for them to call and troubleshoot… They didn’t. I had to go out and so turned my phone off — I got a voice­mail over 4 hours after the time we’d agreed…

This is a fuck­ing saga now. If I don’t get any­where with Dell tomor­row and if I don’t think it is some­thing I can fix myself, I’ll have to pay someone to fix it for me. Why is noth­ing ever simple?

ah..the call centres..yes. I always hang up if I get put through to a non-english per­son, or ask to be trans­ferred back to the ori­ginal point of con­tact to explain that my day is short, my patience shorter and no, I don’t believe the per­son iden­ti­fied as “Dave” is brit­ish — my arse he is, put me through to any­one english/irish or I’ll damned well escal­ate the call..:)

Usu­ally works. They tend to call me back ASAP because they know full well that T&W coun­cil is a big contract.

The “troubleshoot” will just be a load of dam­n­fool questions..if I ever hear “did you check the power unit was con­nec­ted”, “are you sure no indic­ator lights are on” again…I told the guy I’d hunt him down and remove his abil­ity to extend his fam­ily tree.

Do the online troubleshooter, then tell them that you’ve fol­lowed all steps on it, that might cut down on the silliness.

If you were any­where near here, I’d say “drop it in”, but Telford is nowhere near.

If you want any help, my work e-mail is on this comment.

have you tried start­ing it with all things USB unplugged, scanner/printer included (if they’re usb)? Might be a silly question.

If it helps, my Win­dows XP HDD expired between power down last night, and power up this morn­ing. “No boot sec­tor on device, please insert boot disk”.

Boo­hoo. Twas a 20gb 6 year old “spare” drive, so I intend to take it out and shoot it, then buy another. For now, I have Ubuntu.

Many thanks for the point of con­tact Karl — its very much appre­ci­ated, trust me if Telford was closer, I’d be ask­ing what the going rate was for your ser­vices. Dell are a joke. The fiasco star­ted monday morn­ing, its now wed­nes­day night and I’m no closer to even troubleshooting.

I Emailed the guy deal­ing with my case last night giv­ing him details as to when to call me today. 4 and a half hours I sat wait­ing for him to call and troubleshoot the poxy thing… Did he call? My bloody arse he did.

I switched off my phone at 1PM as I had to go and pick up my new wheel­chair and have it adjus­ted and fit­ted (which to my mind is far more import­ant than wait­ing for the cow­boy to call). There was no sense keep­ing the phone on because even if he did call after 1 PM, it would’ve been use­less as I was half way up the M11…

I got an Email at quarter past 2 say that he hadn’t phoned me because he’d been in “train­ing” (and he couldn’t have men­tioned that yes­ter­day or first thing this morn­ing?!) and that all he was get­ting from my num­ber now was voice­mail. (Yes mate, that’s cuz you’re over an hour late… What, you expect me to perch by inop­er­at­ive machinery ALL DAY just incase you call??)

I am this close to telling this lot where to poke it and get­ting a quote from the Com­put­ing Engin­eer that sorts out the Dells for the com­pany where my fam­ily works… This really isn’t even funny any­more, its just a piss take. :[

Nope, not a sausage…unplugged all USB (except key­board as that throws up a “no key­board” error and all I get is:

drive 0 not found: Serial ATA, SATA-0
Strike f1 to continue, f2 to run setup utility

and other sim­ilar errors… Yet another day not get­ting any­where with Dell…my sis­ter is see­ing the tech at her work­place tomorrow…Fingers crossed he has a clue.

nightmare…I’ve got a laptop that’d died on my table…I can recover all the own­ers data, but the laptop itself (1.4 Ath­lon) is a paper­weight due to a failed mother­board. I’ll call him tomor­row to give the bad news.

Sigh. On the other hand, I’ve found a cheap source of new key­boards for my old Dell Inspiron, along with a cheap ram upgrade and a cheap 40gb hard disk. None of the parts are from Dell..they wanted over the ton for a keyboard.

While I have my reser­va­tions now about Dell, this Inspiron 3800 is bulletproof.

Eeeep — and this is exactly why I grabbed the shop floor unit of the last Apple iBook.

2yrs on and all that’s wrong is a dying bat­tery and some mon­itor flicker. Sorry!

Btw, really nice site. I’ve been lurk­ing for month and thought I’d say hi!

I’m so sorry — I remem­ber how excited you were. I hope you get a quick and speedy solu­tion to this.

V xx

Someone who has time on there hands may want to take a survay and send the res­ults to Dell or even the attor­ney gen­eral or some law enfor­cent agency.

I was surf­ing when it happened to me.I had no secur­ity warn­ings or any thing.I not sure what sight it was it was quite awhile a go. I do know it was a sight sug­es­ted by Yor­goo. Im not say­ing Yor­goo had any­thing to do with the prob­lem but but my exper­i­ence was very sim­ilar to what has been men­tioned. I did get the wobly blue screen the i lost con­trol of the computer.

I pan­icked and unplugged my

I had a sim­ilar exper­i­ence. In the end my com­puter screen said load­ing PBR for descriptor 1…done.
Bad PBR.

The prob­lem occured while I was surf­ing for points for Yor­goo foll­wo­ing dir­ec­tions as sug­ges­ted by Yor­goo to earn free advert­ising points. Im not sure what sight I was surfin when it happened.My com­puter changed screens and went blue then star­ted wob­bling. I pan­icked and unplugged my computer.

When I turned it on the Dell Logo came up as nor­mal but after it was fin­ished boot­ing up the was a mes­sage that said

Load­ing PBR for descriptor 1…done.
Bad PBR.

Does any­one know how to repair this problem.

Also about a month prior to this prob­lem. My Phil­lips CD-DVD player that came with the sys­tem stopped working.

At first it would light up at restart ot when turned on but it would not open. I got it open by using a paper clip in the acces whole in front and put in a disk .The disk did not respond when I tried to run it. I tried troubleshooting

At the risk of mak­ing you look a ninny (which is not my inten­tion!) we do indeed have an attor­ney gen­eral in this coun­try, Lord Gold­smith. He works with the Solictor Gen­eral in inter­pret­ting the law.

Hope all goes well with Dell, fail­ing that I can hold your hand through a win­dows reinstall.

WTF? Is that spam or an attempt at con­struct­ive contribution?

I think involving law (or indeed an Attor­ney Gen­eral, as that would involve me con­tact­ing people over­seas as we don’t have those in the UK) is a tad over-zealous, to say the least.

The fact is, my hard­drive was toast and is now being replaced. Yes, I had to endure Indian Call Centres and a sub­sequent com­mu­nic­a­tion prob­lem, but so far, it is all in the pro­cess of being suc­cess­fully resolved.

Sounds like the best thing you could do is call Dell if your machine is under war­ranty, or if it isn’t, make altern­at­ive arrange­ments. Or, just learn to sub­mit com­ments when you’ve actu­ally fin­ished mak­ing your point, so that they make sense.

Really? Wow, I never knew that… Learn some­thing new every­day, as they say.

Fair enough, I stand cor­rec­ted. Though even based on that, I still think con­tact­ing him would be OTT.
Well, I should be get­ting my com­puter back soon, so hope­fully all will be well. But thank you very much for the offer Lew, I’ll keep you in mind if it all goes tits up!