ok so my mom has an inspiron 6400 laptop. dad spilled pepsi on it a couple of years ago, they had a guy clean it well and until last week it worked fine.
to power it off, i have to take out the battery and unplug the laptop. EXIT and the power button wont do it.
to do ANYTHING i have to remove the hard drive, with the hard drive in, it just boots right into media direct mode (which lets you watch DVDs without booting into windows)
if i remove the drive, i can power on and get into the BIOS. after that i get a no boot device error (of course), but can plug the drive back in, reboot and hit ctrl + f11 to get to the restoration partition.
so i did that, restored, set up windows, rebooted 12 or 15 times and thought it was fixed.
mom turns it off, tries to turn it on and it goes back into the media direct loop.
if i remove the drive, power on, get the no device error, power off, add the drive, i can go to the boot menu and get into windows. after that it just does the Media Direct loop again.
did a memtest. mom said this loop is the same thing it did before it got cleaned up after the pepsi spill, so im thinking something corroded completely and theres a short or something causing the laptop to act like the media direct button has been hit or something.
any thoughts or suggestions? preliminary googling told me to restore the laptop to the factory state...but im still getting the problem. i could install linux, i guess, and see how it behaves but honestly im not sure where the media direct stuff is on the disk (if its part of the restore partition, or part of the main partition) so im not sure if that would work or whatever.
to power it off, i have to take out the battery and unplug the laptop. EXIT and the power button wont do it.
to do ANYTHING i have to remove the hard drive, with the hard drive in, it just boots right into media direct mode (which lets you watch DVDs without booting into windows)
if i remove the drive, i can power on and get into the BIOS. after that i get a no boot device error (of course), but can plug the drive back in, reboot and hit ctrl + f11 to get to the restoration partition.
so i did that, restored, set up windows, rebooted 12 or 15 times and thought it was fixed.
mom turns it off, tries to turn it on and it goes back into the media direct loop.
if i remove the drive, power on, get the no device error, power off, add the drive, i can go to the boot menu and get into windows. after that it just does the Media Direct loop again.
did a memtest. mom said this loop is the same thing it did before it got cleaned up after the pepsi spill, so im thinking something corroded completely and theres a short or something causing the laptop to act like the media direct button has been hit or something.
any thoughts or suggestions? preliminary googling told me to restore the laptop to the factory state...but im still getting the problem. i could install linux, i guess, and see how it behaves but honestly im not sure where the media direct stuff is on the disk (if its part of the restore partition, or part of the main partition) so im not sure if that would work or whatever.
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