Blinking cursor on Dell Laptop

[HiveMaster]

Got a laptop from a friend yesterday, she said that all it did was make a clicking noise when she started it. I pulled a floppy out of the A drive and rebooted the machine, thinking that would be it...but nooooooo.
It has the normal boot screen, showing drives, memory, processor, etc. Then it goes to a flashing cursor...and stays there.
I tried using an emergency boot disk, and tried loading the win98 cd and booting from that, but both times the drives kicked and nothing happened after that.

It is an Inspiron 5100.

Any ideas? I thought it might be a hard drive issue but when the darn thing would not boot off of the cd-r or floppy I figured it was something more serious.

 

[HiveMaster]

I know this computer is not worth a lot so fixing it would probably cost almost as much as a refurb replacement, right? Any help, please?

 

[apoppin]

Can you get into BIOS?

You usually have to change the drive order so it boots from CD or floppy first.

 

[HiveMaster]

I set it to boot from floppy first, and when I rebooted the machine, the floppy drive with a ebd in it would run. Briefly. Then it would try the cd-r then the hdd. Each time it seemed like it was trying to access the drive but finding no information??

I reset the bios to go to the cd-r first, and placed the win98 cd in...again, the cd-r spooled up, then shut down...then the fdd went, then the hdd.

Last, I set it so that the fdd would boot first, the hdd second, and the cd-r last...and it actually went to the cd-r! In other words, it looked at the hdd and thought it held no boot data?

At this point I am thinking that there may be an issue beyond a simple fix, since I cannot even get it to go with an ebd. Since the cursor just sits there and blinks at me (no error messages) I cannot think of another thing to try.

 

[apoppin]

I cannot think of another thing to try

Umm, call Dell.

 

[HiveMaster]

Too bad the thing is too old for that.

 

[MWink]

You could try posting it at DellTalk Forums.