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White Screen of Death...Ahhhhhhh

B

Bluto

Senior member
Ok....this is driving me crazy.

I've got a Dell Latitude, CPx (J), PIII, 650 Mhz, 256 M RAM and a 12 GHD. Nothing elaborate and I just got it off ebay. It's been working great so far. No hint of any trouble whatsoever.

I just loaded XP Pro on it yesterday, and other software as well. The hard Drive (HD) is only about 1/3 full. I'm not use to XP, so I tried to plug in a pair of headphones from a radio to the headphone port. I plugged these in before I booted the machine.

Now...during bootup it goes to a white screen and it says:

"The device in the system modular bay cannot be identified. It may not be completely inserted or may have some other problem. Please read and complete the following steps in order:

1) Press device completely and firmly into the bay.
2)Press the ESC key--wait for the system to power down.
3) Press the power button to retry detecting the device."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ok...first.....the headphones fit just fine into the port. It is as firmly inserted as it can be. It is also the correct port. I checked carefully before putting it in.

Next.....doing either of the other two steps does nothing. It powers down and boots back up to this white screen.

I tried entering the bios or the boot menu screen while it's booting, but nothing helps. The computer seems to be stuck in some kind of weird loop where it thinks it's trying to identify this mysterious piece of 'hardware'.

I tried rebooting it over and over. I tried removing the battery and leaving it out for 15 minutes or so. I tried plugging another device that I know it recognizes (floppy drive, in it's own port). I tried plugging a pair of speakers in, which is next to the headphone port thinking that if it had something else in this 'bay' maybe it would 'snap out of' whatever loop it's stuck in.

Nothing helps....the computer boots to this white screen......aaaaargh! :disgust:

Anyone have any idea how to fix this...pleeeease?

bluto 🙁
 
I am not familiar with the Latitudes, but do you have a CD-Rom/optical drive or FDD that is able to slide out? Maybe you pressed the release button? Try powering on the computer without anything in the bay.
 
I gotta concur. I think you hit the eject button on the bottom of the laptop and it popped either the FDD or CDROM (whatever you ahve installed) outta its bay... on the front right.
 
Thanks for (both) thyose suggestions. Not only did I make sure it was, indeed, pushed in all the way, I ejected it and made certain I planted it firmly in place. It didn't help.

Actually....it is working now. I did nothing more than leave it sit (powered off) for a couple hours. I rebooted it....it came up with a window saying windows was resuming. A screen I was not able to get out of (again). I powered it off...left the things sit for a couple minutes, powered it up again and it successfully booted to my desktop.

Beats the hell outa me what was wrong, but it's working, and this whole thing just adds still more credibility to what I keep saying; that Microsoft is the most widespread, ubiquitous (computer) virus on the planet.

Thanks for the ideas.....

b- 🙂
 
Not that I have love for Microsoft, but the message you were getting sounded like it appeared before the OS even began to load. It was strictly a problem with the hardware.
 
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