m170 wont boot

I was trying to be a good dad and bought my kid a used m170 off of ebay.....being a out of work auto worker i didnt have much of a selection....it came with no hdd.....but it looks in great shape. i turn it on the dell logo comes on.....no it does two things it either boots and says internal hdd error or it will shut off......the few times ive been able to get into bios it says hdd none. Most of the time it goes thru post screen and then shuts off. Im just trying to get my kid a nice pc for college please help.....seems like fan on left side blowing lot more air than right.....please help

 

Well, you need a hard drive for a laptop to work, so...

 

To me, Dell=bad. Used Dell=even worse.

Depending on how much you spent, you could have gotten a very good new laptop from HP or another brand. I recently got the HP DV5Z for $650 with the coupon I used, which included getting the upgrade to the best CPU they offer for it and the dedicated graphics card.

 

i put a seagate 100gb drive in it....keeps saying not in there

 

To me HP=Very Bad, Very Bad performance, Dell=Very Good especially XPS series which blows HP out of the water.

 

bump....any help very appreciated

 

Check the connection to the harddrive first. Harddrive could be faulty or the cable to the harddrive is faulty. Or the motherboard is faulty. Actually if you just have another harddrive laying around you could at least test that to see if the first harddrive is faulty.

But double check the connection cable first, SATA cable.

 

Maybe that's why that person sold it to you without a harddrive other than he wanted what was on it...just a thought.

My friend bought a used laptop without a harddrive once and it wouldn't read any drive he put into it so he ended up dumping it.

 

magnus...i am a noobie but i dont believe that this laptop is a sata drive....i think it is ide

 

Ah dang sorry I actually own a XPS M170 myself. You are right it is not SATA, it´s IDE. Long time ago since I used my M170 now due to a broken GPU. Getting a new go 7800GTX soon though since this M170 still performs really well even runs Crysis at 1280x800 medium settings, tweaked at 30 fps average in the benchmark test

 

that is exactly what gpu this has... a 7800gtx....the bios is a05 is that a problem......just cant get this thing to turn on all the time....is there a xps guru in here....just trying to get this running for my kid

 

I know its not any help, but it sounds like you have bought a dud. If you cant even turn it on reliably, and its not recognising the HD you've installed, it sounds pretty terminal to me.

Only suggestion I can think of is make sure its on AC power, if your running on battery it could be flat, hence a possible reason why it wont switch on.

CMOS battery could be flat ?, they tend to last around 3 years, and could be causing issues with the Bios settings, but I would still expect the system to see the HD.

What HD did you buy ? Make ? Model etc ?

 

seagate 100gb, 4200rpm, I already returned it waiting for replacement

 

finnally got hard drive to recognize but laptop shuts off before i can install windows xp.......sometimes it comes back with a m1004 error

 

as soon as i disabled speedstep in the bios i was able to load windows.....only problem laptop runs at 800mhz......if i enable speedstep it shuts off before windows loads.....any thoughts....anyone?!!!!!!

 

wow i mustve picked the wrong forum