Dropped an Inspiron N4110 and won't power on... any thoughts?

Hi everybody

New member here and an admitted Mac user but looking for some opinions on my girls Inspiron laptop. She dropped it last night from a height of about 2 feet and now it won't power up. Just sort of wondering what we might be up against here and if there is anything that I can do before seeking professional help.

The situation is this... the power light does come on when pressed and the 3 lights on the upper right of the keyboard come on as well but it won't go any further and shuts off shortly after. I can hear no beeps but do hear the drive starting to spin up briefly. I did reseat the Ram and no joy either. The laptop was powered off when it was dropped. Any thoughts appreciated!

 

Hi sorry to hear about that, this model has a built in drop sensor (free-fall) and ideally should have parked the heads, and then continued working. Few things you can check; is the battery loose? at boot time can you press f2 and get to the bios setting screen? can you boot from a USB or cd drive. You will have to go through a process of elimination to check if the Hard disk is busted or the motherboard related electronics is damaged. Following is some info on the sensor.

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pull battery, hold power button 10 seconds, then check ram and hdd connections
try to power up then

 

Thanks guys... tried your suggestions but no luck yet. One question though... how do you boot from the CD drive? Is there an install disc that I could use to try that? She does have the original Dell Drivers and Utilities Disc but it mentions nothing on the disc itself about it being bootable. Would that have been the only disc that came with it?

 

Hmm, sounds serious, are you sure that you do not even see the dell logo at startup? if you see it press f2 immediately to get to the setup screen, that will show if the system picked the hard disk.

I dont think that the driver/util disk is bootable, unless she created a rescue disk set. Try any bootable cd, windows XP is ok, or ubuntu, any linux, even DOS, most of these are set to boot from cd first by default.

Also are there any physical damage/ rattles cracks visible? is the unit under warranty?

Good luck.

 

Definitely don't see the Dell logo... it just briefly lights the power button and no sign of life from the display at all. I don't see any physical damage and it landed basically flat and closed. No rattles either... I can check on the warranty but I know she bought it off QVC maybe 3 months ago and still has one payment left.

 

Sounds like an component inside is loosen...

If completely nothing shows on the screen after pressing the power button, you might just want to take it apart and check all components are connected, then power it up again..

 

Solved! It appears that the outlet that the laptop was plugged into shorted out or something when it was dropped. Plugged it into a different outlet and charged the battery and joy Thanks for the input guys...

 

You are welcome! Glad that it was simple as a discharged battery. I was stumped when you said that the logo did not come on at power up and just had a flash of led's. This is a good lesson for me too to look at a problem in a simple way than expecting the worst. Next time will remember to ask "is the battery charged", had I asked that you could have fixed the problem quickly.

Cheers!

 

Signed up just to answer to this post.

This thread helped me solve my issue and save a lot of time and potentially money trying to fix my laptop.

I had the exact same problem, and the solution ended up being exactly the same.

The power cord obviously stopped working and therefore was not charging the battery. The batter went completely dead and I could not get the laptop to power up at all.

After reading this post, I plugged my spare power cord into the computer and it worked instantly.

The funny thing is that the cord that died was the Dell one that came with the computer, and the one that I am working off of now was the $5 ebay one I bought.

Thanks again for this post, I would have never though the solution would have been so simple and have nothing to do with the computer itself.