Have you reste CMOS by removing the battery? Was K your boot system disc?

And were there any power surges or the like when you were shutting down?

Thanks, guys.


You can be so... subtle, yrag. I indeed figured there was somethin' serious wrong when no POST progress bar appeared.

The K:\ drive was not my boot drive - it was/is a Seagate external USB HDD I use for nightly backups.

Went through a number of steps with the Dell tech, including pulling the memory modules & video card, unplugging power & data cables to the HDD & DVD, & powering up again with various combinations of hardware replaced.

After assessing various beep codes I relayed to him via chat...

Ah, I love the smell of motherboard toast in the morning!

New motherboard on the way, with a tech to install it - still under warranty, TBTG.

Now, just hope my C:\ drive is still in good shape.

I really didn't think it was the MB (although, it certainly could have been). The machine actually did POST....you just couldn't read the writing as to where it stopped underneath the Dell billboard (you need to disable that). For what it's worth, I thought then, and still do, that it's that external USB drive. They don't play nice with backup apps (if you upgrade to Vista, sell it) and restoring an active drive from them is tenuous, at best. My guess is that your system just flat out overpowered the USB write capacities. It may never happen again or.......  

....then again, it could just be the wicked computer fairy fuckin' with ya   

In the bios, there should be a setting to disable Splash Screen. Being proprietary, it might not be there. Never owned one, so I don't know.



If you're asking why it's there...it's nothing more than advertisement. If you're asking why disable it.....that's where your post is showing (underneath it) on the screen at boot. That's also where it tells you why it stopped.



Absolutely. The speed of USB 1.0 or 2.0 is inherently slow. There was a time that it could run in a 'normal' system without being demonstratively evident of its shortcomings. Those days are long gone. My recommendation (if you want one) is to get an external eSata drive. Even with that, I would still monitor as to how much data from different sources I was attempting to write at the same time....there's only one arm dancing on that platter.



When your USB went off line (errored out), it borked the bios boot sequence. My guess is you also have a wireless keyboard/mouse. Thus the beeps. Proprietary boards have no means by which to initialize USB devices, so it just stalled before it could get to the Windows drivers load (that's why active drive image restores via a USB drive are problematic). When he/you reset the bios defaults, the active drive (C:) was restored. If this happens again, plug in a PSU keyboard and access the bios to reset defaults. Failing that, short the JBAT jumper or pull the battery for thirty seconds.

That's the same as a wireless. If your machine fails to initialize the USB ports on boot and you squirreled away an old PS2 keyboard (you don't need the mouse) just plug it in (you don't have to remove the USB connectors - your computer doesn't care how many keyboards are attached) and hit the appropriate bios key to enter the bios. After you reset the bios and exit, remove the PSU keyboard.

If you can't disable the Dell howdy-do screen in the bios press ESC key during the Splash Screen to see the boot up information. Press the Pause/Break key if the text displays too fast (ENTER to resume).




My pleasure.