Dell Vostro 1500 Hardware Problems?

[PJester]

Hello,
I have a Dell Vostro 1500 with some possible Hardware Problems. I wanted to get some feedback from the rest of the community on if I am looking in the right direction.

The laptop was running Microsoft Vista Home Basic and was encountering several programs not responding throughout the day. So I decided it was time for a format. So I backed up the personal files on an external drive and decided to just do a "Dell Factory Restore". Well I ran that, and I would get an error message in the middle of the install. The Error Message did not contain any text, just a red circle with and X, very odd. So I thought it was maybe a problem with the "Dell Factory Restore" image. So I thought maybe this is a Hard Drive Problem. So I purchased a brand new Western Digtial 160GB SATA Drive from New Egg.

I took out the old hard drive and put in the new one and got " No Internal Boot Sectors to Boot To". So I was like ummm ... Bad Hard Drive?

Well I booted to the Windows Vista Business CD I had and ran an install. Everything went great yet when it was done the install and rebooted I got a "System Repair Screen" which kept failing.

So i decided to run a Dell Diagnostic. The Dell Diagnostic found an Error 2000-0123 with DIMM Slot A (AKA Bad DIMM) So I went in and removed the "bad" DIMM from slot A and replaced it with the DIMM from slot B. I reran a Dell Diagnostic and it came out clear.

I then tried to do another format and reinstall of Vista Business and still got the "System Repair screen" which kept failing. Any thoughts here?

 

[foothead]

does the BIOS properly detect the hard drive?

run a memtest as well.

 

[PJester]

The BIO does detect the HD

I ran the Dell Diagnostic and it came out fine for the 1 DIMM thats in Slot A right now. Do you still believe I should run a MemTest?

So I broke out my Windows 7 64 OS Disk, that installed no problem and runs fine, boots right to the desktop, wtf!? lol I need to put Vista Home Basic on there, as that is what the laptop came with.

Think reformating again with the Vista Disk might work now that Win7 worked fine?

 

[foothead]

Try it. Might work.

I would give the memtest a shot anyway though.

 

[PJester]

The Vista install is "Expanding Files" right now, so we shall see. The other thing i was considering was my Vista CD being scratched enough that it's causing a corrupt OS install. The bottom of this CD looks like it's been through a wood chipper. I might consider contacting Microsoft and having them send me another copy. Thoughts?

 

[foothead]

yeah, that would be the problem.

or you could borrow one, then use nlite to create an ISO and burn your own copy. I always back up my Windows install disks.

 

[PJester]

yeah, that would be the problem.

or you could borrow one, then use nlite to create an ISO and burn your own copy. I always back up my Windows install disks.

I usually do the same thing, ofcourse this is the one OS I didn't. Epic Fail

So the Vista install went through and ofcourse gave me the "System Repair Screen" and failed. So it's got to be my Vista CD right?

 

[foothead]

Probably if its as scratched as you described.

Try to get a hold of a different CD. IIRC, vista had all the installs on one disc (or so I heard), so as long as you got the right bit count, it should work.