Tricky Problem with a Dell Laptop

[Deesul]

First, some background: It's my girlfriend's laptop that she bought refurbished, it's a Dell Latitude d420. She said it never came with any discs at all, which I find odd.

She received an error the other day during boot-up that said something about corrupt files and now whenever you try to boot the thing it goes through the Dell screen and then goes to a black screen and just says "Error loading operating system"

I ran it through it's BIOS diagnostics and everything checked out fine so I'm assuming this is a software error. The problem is that there are no recovery discs or anything so I'm not even sure where to begin with this thing. There isn't any important data so anything is fair game.

Any thoughts on where to begin with this?

 

[Billb2]

There should be a recovery partition on the HDD (puts the computer back to the state it was in when it left the factory) that is accessed by a key press at post up.

I don't know what the key press is for that model (F-1, F-2, F-11...?), but you can go to dell and find out.

You could just reload an OS and get the drivers from dell too.

 

[Gunbuster]

D420 shipped with an OS recovery CD. No recovery partition. The ipod sized HDD in the 420 is absolute shit. I would not be surprised if it is going bad even if Diags say it's OK.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

You can get a copy of the cd from a friend or even P2P. Its not the cd media that is important, but the license key which is likely stickered to the machine

 

[ecom]

The media is important if you are getting it through someone else or P2P. How can you be sure that the media hasn't been tampered with?

 

[sivart]

Look at the bottom of the machine and see if you can find a friend / co-worker with a Dell OEM recovery disc of the same version (I.e. Windows Professional XP) and make a copy of the disc. No worries that it has been tampered with if it is the original.

I wouldn't trust P2P. I have a couple of extra sealed Dell XP Pro recovery discs....don't ask

 

[ecom]

Those Dell CDs aren't hard to obtain. They're all over eBay if anyone cares to look.

 

[Tech_savy]

Take the laptop to the dell service center and check out the prices of the hardware