Hi Everyone I desperately need your help

Last night I was removing Vista on my inspiron 2006...As i was reformating I went to the corner store and some idiot at my friends house turned off the laptop... arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

anyways it was at 91 percent reformatted...

As I was flipping out at the person lollol I calmed down and turned it back on....

I get a black screen of death after the dell splash screen comes on and at the top left corner a message says error loading system files.. or something like that

I tried pressing F12 to get the boot menu but nothing happens.......

Can anyone please help me... I do not have the Dell discs anymore...

I cant even go in the bios....

If anyone has a tip on how to get me to boot from the CDRom drive...

Im not a computer genius so im in trouble on this one.. I was trying to reinstall XP on it with the OEM Windows XP CD

Thank you in advance

_Viper_

 

And why don't you have the discs anymore? If you can't get into the BIOS, that's not a result of reformatting, so your story doesn't make sense.

 

First, not being able to get into the bios has nothing to do with exiting the reformat. This is a part of the motherboard that has nothing to do with the hard drive (it will be there even if you remove your hard drive). Are you sure you cant get into the bios? Remember hit F2 several times when you see the dell logo.

Since pressing F12 doesn't work, that means your recovery partition is current or deleted. This means you have no other choice but to install from a windows disk.

To boot to a cd, it should do it automatically. If it does not, you will need to get into the bios to change the boot order.

 

i know what you mean. you have to take the hard drive out, put it in an enlosure, plug it into another computer via the usb or firewire on the enclosure. The drive will show up in my computer. right click it and click format, it will format the drive in the enclosure and you will be able to install windows. this happened to me before, this is the only way i know of to fix it, i was reformatting and at 98% my cat knocked the external cd drive off the table (if was a tablet with no internal cd drive) eventually i thought that this might work so i tried it. nobody else seemed to think it was the problem because it wouldnt boot from a disc or anything and it said "error no operating system installed"
along with other errors

after formatting hard drive while connected to another computer all i did was put it back in the laptop and popped windows in. It worked fine

 

I moved out of my house when i divorced, I left alot of stuff behind and my discs are one of those things..

Like i was saying i turn back on the laptop and I get the Dell splash screen I press F12 or F2 which it says at the top right corner but like one second after a message comes on at the top left corner saying error loading system files...

This laptop is not stolen and I am not trying to pull any tricks....
I simply need your help with this....

Thank you

 

Everything that pixelot said and

Why don't you try downloading a live CD such as partedmagic and complete the reformat with that? If you need help with how to do this then post and I can help.

EDIT: wow there's been a lot of posts since I first clicked onto this about 10 minutes ago and only pixelot had applied. I think that everything I said is still relevant though. But, if you don't have Vista disks then what OS will you use after the reformat?

EDIT 2: And why did you automatically assume that we'd think it was stolen? It's just made me suspicious of something that had never crossed my mind.....

 

Wow thank you so much !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i really appreciate that ..... BTW what is an Enclosure ???Thanks a million....

 

Press it a bunch of times.
So you do have the Windows disc, right?

 

Yes Sir I do i have the OEM windows XP CD with cd key and all.....

 

An enclosure is simply a case you can put an internal hard drive into to read from another computer; its basically like making it an external hard drive.

 

But I hope you realize...reformatting the drive will still not fix the BIOS, which seems to be a problem.

 

i just know when it happened to me nothing would work (pretty sure bios wouldnt work either which is why no one thought what i said would fix it...but it did) something messed up everything. doing what i said did fix it. maybe it was just luck or coincidence that it worked after but everything does work. im on the computer i did it with right now.

but there has to be a reason it worked

 

Thanks alot Steve .... I have to say that what you experienced is exactly what happened to me do I absolutely need an enclosure...??? or can a certain cable do the trick>???

 

Edit: Double Post

 

a male to male usb cable might let another computer recognize the hard drive in the one your having trouble with as a USB mass storage device and you might be able to format it just as you could to an mp3 player or something but I've never done it this way so I'm not sure. enclosure is a good safe bet .just buy it from future shop and return it next day.

 

I may have a better idea then using a enclosure drive... the thing is, my friend had almost the same problems but he left his laptop felt down the table and the HD collapsed... we didnt know that was a hd though... but as i got a external HD we took it out to swap the hds and get his assignments back. although didnt work because my external is a 3.5" and the laptop's hd connectors are far smaller then that i had, i just realizes that when i had my external apart and his hd off already. Then looking for the screws i saw the Ubuntu DVD that i had and i asked him to try it out even with no hd...then we saw the bios working back again just as nothing had happen so reallizes he had to get another HD and work hard on his assignments lol...

well here it goes. if you are able to get the hd off and get the bios working, just change the boot, and then with a UBUNTU cd you can get access to the hd and then reformat from there HOWEVER even though taking off the hd you have no access to the BIOS you're mainly screw up lol sorry, you can try the enclosure though which i think it will not work as far as you have a problem with you motherboard. good luck

ps: my friend laptop was a dell as well... until he gets the new hd he was using his laptop with a ubuntu dvd over the lectures and to saving everything else using a pen drive it was working great hehehe

edit: using an enclosure drive make sure this working with laptop HDs...

 

See, that's what gets me. Why shouldn't he be able to access his BIOS? That's bogus. :twitcy:

 

that true... i have no idea as well, but it happened with my friend... thats all i can say
but since no broken hd on bios was working fine... and the new hd on... working fine, just saying

 

I gotcha.