Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
I was trying to help out my uncle by taking a look at his Dell Studio. He has two kids and I have no idea as to what exactly happened as far as error codes because he doesn't know anything about computers so BSOD was all I got for background info. It baffled me beyond belief that a laptop would have a slot-loading optical with no emergency eject and you literally have to take the entire laptop apart to remove the drive(How did it never occur to any engineer to speak up about media being non-recoverable if stuck in the drive?).
After hitting the power button the laptop POSTS and the blue status bar makes it 2/3 of the way full before hanging. When I press escape it shows things stopping at BIOS and VBIOS are shadowed. I know little about these but saw the same screen while searching and it had the HDD show after the BIOS shadow(s). The optical drive also has a DVD stuck in it. The eject key doesn't work nor any other option found searching the internet. I disassembled the laptop and removed the drive, but still there is no way to get the disc out short of ripping apart the drive. Replacing it is pointless because of the built-in design.
If I'm at the Dell splash screen and try to enter Setup or Boot the F-key indicator on the bottom right of the screen simply turn from grey to white while nothing happens. Pressing escape shows the option of entering setup with F2, but it hangs at entering setup. I tried an external USB keyboard. The HDD in the laptop is a WD Scorpio that's 8 months old and was purchased new/retail so I have no recovery partition.
I tried to boot into Parted Magic via USB but that did nothing either since I don't think the laptop is even getting that far. Oddly enough, I removed the internal battery for some time and hit power with all electrical sources removed. The batter was out of the motherboard for a couple of hours while I checked over everything so after putting everything back together I thought it would ask me to enter setup but it didn't.
Could the internal battery be dead? Possibly a dead HDD that is somehow preventing the POST? Any tips or ideas it would be much appreciated. The POST does indicate all of the memory, which I reseated with the HDD. I hear no noises from the HDD, but the optical does sound terrible. There is one noise when I hit the eject button but it doesn't occur if I press the button again. The disc does spin-up but there are two metal pieces over the slot that prevent physical extraction of the disc without possibly breaking the optical... which if it's the culprit then removing the drive is a small price to have a functional laptop(I should have removed the optical but I thought it was a simple malfunction and I'd get the disc out).
Studio 1555 POST Hanging/Broken DVD Drive
Discussion in 'Dell' started by Divide_by_Zero, Sep 9, 2011.
