Hi all,
I have a dell inspiron 8100. I was having troubles with it starting. It would boot up and get a screen that said it could not locate a boot device. It would not find the cd rom drive or locate the hard drive. This is after an extended period of not working at all. Well I had the bright idea of taking it completely apart. So with my trusty manual in hand I completely gutted it down to the processor and motherboard being removed and dissassembled and I even disconnected the reserve battery. After putting it all back together twice. All that it will do is the lights for startup will light up for about 5 seconds then it dies it will not post, and the fans and harddrive aren't accessed. I have tried starting it up with the harddrive removed, just battery power, just ac, memory removed. Any thoughts. Please save me from myself. It had worked fine in the past.

Thanks,
Mike

Did you remove the processor from the motherboard?

Yes I did. Then reinstalled it.

You may want to check that the processor is properly seated and the socket is locked. This can cause a laptop to not post.

yea

try that :mrgreen: yupp

Did you ever get this working? I've gone through 3 motherboards that all do the same thing. Lights up for a second, then shuts off -- no fans, nothing. Almost seems like a bios reset/flash issue?

jb

No I never did get it running. Ended up just buying a new laptop and am going to sell the other for parts.
Thanks for responding.

Mike

I have a dell Inspiron 8000 that will not start. After pressing the start button it will only make a few sounds and you can see a quick bleep in the screen and nothing elese happens. Can anybody help