need help with Dell Latitude LS

for some reason its not booting as it used to but its around 4-6 years old i havnt yet brought it to a store to see whats going on it jest says for the first part all the copyright info. and something about a pre boot eXecution Enviorment not sure but it jest stays there and im positive its not a faulty battery becase iv tried taking the battery.

also it goes to another screen saying Operating System not found
and it asks to configure but anyhow if anyone could help that would be great

 

Sold one of these a while ago... I think the "pre-boot execution" bit indicates that your first boot device is a network device; in all other scenarios it should go straight to "operating system not found"... which simply means that you don't have an OS installed.

 

go into the bios, and set the primary boot device to the internal harddrive. If you cannot find this, than try to find the load defaults button. Once you set the bios back to its factory defaults everything should work again. My bro has a latitude Ls, and its more like an 8yr old system. His has had harddrive issues in the past, and usually taking the harddrive out and putting it back in helps. It has some design flaws, so you may have to remove the keyboard in order to slide the harddrive in and out.
The harddrive may have also went dead after all those years, so it may be time for a new laptop. Hopefully it works after you try reinserting it, or doing the bios tricks.

K-TRON

 

i tried that or something in the form of defualt but i think you might be right jest get a new laptop it jest keeps coming up as Operating System not found
but i wish it would work

oh and i havnt tried taking the hard drive out or in other words im not sure on how to

 

I will have my brother come on and tell you how to take the harddrive in and out. He has done it numerous times during the years he has had it.

K-TRON

 

It's only two screws; no caddy or anything. Take a look on page 15 of the service manual: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/latls/sm_en/3538u0.pdf

Either way, I'm pretty sure your machine is recognizing the hard drive - otherwise you'd be getting a "primary disk not found" sort of error, and not an "operating system not found" sort of error. You should almost certainly be able to go right ahead and install an OS without messing with the drive...