Inspiron wont boot (blue screen)

Hooyah

Solid State Member
Messages
16
Alright, I have been fixing computers for some time now, I'm no expert but I help out people I know. Anyway, I am working on a Dell Inspiron 1318 that won't boot. He just wanted me to reinstall his vista 32bit home primium.

I wrote zeros to the entire drive then installed windows. The problem is when it tries to boot for the first time it gets to the loading windows screen then it blue screens, and does the same thing each subsequent time. So I retried drive wipe and reinstall with the same result. I tried another working HDD in the laptop and it did the exact same thing.

Here comes the fun part, I removed the DIMM from socket B and bingo, it starts right up. It runs fine until you try to restart or shut down. It will not reboot after the initial time it works, not even if you leave it for an hour. So I put DIMM B back in and removed DIMM A and, you guessed it, started fine once and would never reboot.

So.....I ran memtest86 for 7 hrs and it found NO errors (CPU cashe disabled). I put two sticks of RAM in that I know are good, and yet again it booted only one time.

It seams that anytime I change the amount of memory, or the configuration of the memory, I can get it to work one time and thats it. It did also work one time when I put both original DIMMs back in after having only one in on the previous boot atempt. I have run checkdisc several times also.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, Thanks
 
You said if you leave it on for an hour after getting it past the loading screen that it will shut down? That to me sounds like an overheating issue if your ram has tested fine.

Another issue may be that the ram slots themselves have gone bad though I still think its an overheating issue.
 
I read the post and I didn't see that it shut down after an hour...but I could be reading it bad. And, 7 hours of Memtest and that didn't shut down? I don't think it could be overheating...but I'd say to clean it with compressed aire...at least for maintenance.

You've swapped hard drives, and that still didn't go.

I'd say to check the drivers as well. Update them to the latest. Another way of booting is into safe mode. Try to see if you can boot to Safe mode when it crashes on booting normaly. If it does go in, then I'd try updating the drivers, like the graphics drivers for a first.
 
I read the post and I didn't see that it shut down after an hour...but I could be reading it bad. And, 7 hours of Memtest and that didn't shut down? I don't think it could be overheating...but I'd say to clean it with compressed aire...at least for maintenance.

You're right I misread. ><

Can you read and write down what blue screen error you're getting?

Also, are you sure that the copy of vista home premium + key is legit?
 
I ment that even when I leave it shut down for an hour it still won't start. I though of overheating but it barely gets warm so I don't think that is an issue.

The slots may have gone bad, not sure how I can test those though.

I updated all the drivers when I got it to boot the first time. Tried safe mode many time but it doesn't work.

If I get it to boot again I will check for resouces conflicts, even though that shouldn't happen with PnP. Going to flash the BIOS now, i'll tell you what happens. Thanks for the replies.

The copy of vista and key are definitely legit. Blue screen flashes for a tenth of a second so I can't see what it says.

Update: I flashed the BIOS and now it will start up fine if the laptop is shut off, but if you click restart it does the same thing. I suppose you could just not use the restart button but I would rather fix it 100%.

Dell Insprion 1318 BOIS A00 updated to A06.
 
Got the stop error:

Stop: 0x0000007B (0x80403BA0,0xC0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000)

This happens only on restart, any ideas?

Problem solved: Installed service pack 1 for vista.

He had service pack 2 on the pc when the problem started. I think it was more than one problem, but it's working now so I'm happy.

Thanks a lot for the posts guys :)
 
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