Any ideas why my Dell PC could not boot?

[Skyzoomer]

I have a Dell XPS8900 running Windows 10.

Yesterday, I wanted to boot from a USB stick so I did a shutdown, plugged the USB stick into the upper left USB2 port, and pressed the power on button. The LED in the power button lit amber, then it started flashing in a 2-1 cycle. No POST or any display on the monitor. Just amber colored led and flashing.

(The USB stick has a bootable Linux rescue OS for Terabytes' Image for DOS to do backups or restores. It's known working since I've used it many times before.)

To try to fix the problem, I disconnected the power cord, pressed the power button for 30 seconds, and plugged the power cord back in. The power button glowed amber and the 2-1 blinking kept cycling. I unplugged the USB stick, my external USB3 hard drive docking station and my USB2 scanner. My two USB printers and Logitech receiver for keyboard and mouse still plugged in. Still got the 2-1 blinking.

I turned off the blinking by holding the power button in and then tested the power supply by pressing the button on the power supply. (Dell power supply has this feature.) First press the green light did not come on. Second press the green light came on. Pressed the PC's power on button but the 2-1 blinking cycled again.

It was late so I unplugged the power cord and went to sleep. This morning I plugged the power cord back in and the PC immediately powered on and the power button lit white as normal. Win10 booted normally and everything is working normally.

Any ideas on why this happened? Maybe someone had a similar thing happen with their Dell PC.

 

[Ketchup]

Funny, my old Dell did this the other day (no usb drive involved though). My guess is it took a night for everything to actually discharge. As far as your boot issue, not sure about that one - what port did you use? Try using a port in thr back, that is actually attached to the board.

 

[Skyzoomer]

Funny, my old Dell did this the other day (no usb drive involved though). My guess is it took a night for everything to actually discharge. As far as your boot issue, not sure about that one - what port did you use? Try using a port in thr back, that is actually attached to the board.

I plugged the USB stick into the upper left USB2 port on the XPS8900. That is where I've plugged it in many times before when I did backups and it worked fine. Will try again in a day or two since I need to do a backup.

If anyone had a similar problem and figured out why it happened, please post your experience.

Thanks,
Skyzoomer

 

[Skyzoomer]

I have a Dell XPS8900 running Windows 10.

Yesterday, I wanted to boot from a USB stick so I did a shutdown, plugged the USB stick into the upper left USB2 port, and pressed the power on button. The LED in the power button lit amber, then it started flashing in a 2-1 cycle. No POST or any display on the monitor. Just amber colored led and flashing.

(The USB stick has a bootable Linux rescue OS for Terabytes' Image for DOS to do backups or restores. It's known working since I've used it many times before.)

To try to fix the problem, I disconnected the power cord, pressed the power button for 30 seconds, and plugged the power cord back in. The power button glowed amber and the 2-1 blinking kept cycling. I unplugged the USB stick, my external USB3 hard drive docking station and my USB2 scanner. My two USB printers and Logitech receiver for keyboard and mouse still plugged in. Still got the 2-1 blinking.

I turned off the blinking by holding the power button in and then tested the power supply by pressing the button on the power supply. (Dell power supply has this feature.) First press the green light did not come on. Second press the green light came on. Pressed the PC's power on button but the 2-1 blinking cycled again.

It was late so I unplugged the power cord and went to sleep. This morning I plugged the power cord back in and the PC immediately powered on and the power button lit white as normal. Win10 booted normally and everything is working normally.

Any ideas on why this happened? Maybe someone had a similar thing happen with their Dell PC.

Found the problem. Maybe this might help others in the future.

Plugging in the USB stick had nothing to do with the problem. Even with the USB stick unplugged, the system would boot Win10 normally after leaving it with the power cord unplugged for a few hours. Then after running for a while and doing a shutdown, the 2-1 blinking problem occurred when trying to power back on.

Figured that it wasn't related to power draining off since after I unplugged the power cord, I had held the power on button down for at least 10 seconds or more many times and the 2-1 blinking still occurred.

So I came to the conclusion that it was probably a heat problem in either the power supply or the motherboard. I had an old spare power supply so I substituted it for the original one. Bingo, now the 8900 powers up after shutdowns normally. The power supply that came with the 8900 developed a heat problem.

The thing that is disconcerting is that I had found the Dell "Diagnostic LEDs" document online and it says that for the 2-1 blink pattern, a motherboard failure has occurred and the recommended action is to replace the motherboard. It never mentions that the power supply could be a cause. In fact all of the recommended actions for any blink sequence never mentions that the power supply could be the cause. I can see where folks could end up buying a replacement motherboard, ram, cpu, etc. for nothing when the problem is really the power supply.

Anyway, I hope this helps others with a Dell XPS8900 (and probably the XPS8700 too).
Skyzoomer

 

[deustroop]

ok

 

[Ketchup]

Nice. When I found the computer I mentioned, it wouldn't boot at all. Like yours, my beep code said a bad motherboard (it's a Vista-era AIO). Once I dug into it, turned out to just be a loose connection.

Conclusion: Dell beep codes suck.