Dead Dell Inspiron 5100 Laptop - Help

[henryrhenryr]

My laptop has been working for years - now it won't boot.

I press the power button, the fan whirrs up as normal. About 3-5 seconds of normal whirring. Then it dies. Nothing appears on screen. It sounds like it does when I try to boot from battery when the battery is dead but the AC power is in.

I have tried:

- left it charging over night
- battery in no AC
- battery out AC only

Always exactly the same.

I have two questions - thanks in advance if you can help:

1 - How can I get it to boot?
2 - How can I recover the data from the hard disk which I presume is fine as it worked a few days ago.

THANKS!

[bluetige]

Take out the battery and try to run it with just the charger plugged in

To recover the data your best off purchasing a 2.5 hdd caddy and place the Hard Drive from your laptop in to it. You will the be able to plug the Caddy into any computer via USB to recover your data

[henryrhenryr]

Take out the battery and try to run it with just the charger plugged in

Thanks for your reply but no luck with this.

Good suggestions on the HD caddy - Thanks...

Does anyone have other ideas for getting it to boot?

[henryrhenryr]

I eventually solved this problem. It was very simple.

For some reason taking out the RAM and putting it back in fixed it. Otherwise it seems this type of problem can also be caused by a dead motherboard.

These sites, which I eventually found, were more helpful:

http://www.laptoprepair101.com/laptop/2008/06/14/laptop-dead-troubleshoot-the-problem
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/31774-20-dell-inspiron-5100-power