Black screen, no sound, nothing. Hooked it to a PC monitor, still nothing. Dell said it was a motherboard issue. Then, I left it alone for several months and today I turned it on and it worked until I powered it down. Now it won't boot up again. Do you think it is the motherboard if it booted up today?
Seems to me if it ran normally until powered down that the motherboard would have to be functioning, no? It's a boot or startup problem, but there are all kinds of hardware and software issues that could cause that. Have you tried booting into safe mode or last known good configuration by pressing F8 as it boots up?
Try going to Dell support and enter your service tag # and see if there are any service bulletins or advisories for your laptop, then maybe search the Dell forums for reports of the same. If the motherboard was an issue on your model, you'll find some forum posts about it.
See also Dell support for your boot problem here.
If you get it booted up again, you might like to take a look at the event viewer and device manager and see if there are errors or warnings posted that indicate software or hardware problems on your system. Also consider running the Dell diagnostics utility (see here) to check the system health. And run chkdsk to scan the hard drive for corruption. (instructions here and here)
Malware removal protocols I'd recommend as a check here.
Good general troubleshooting for windows here and startup here.
I hope this information allows you to resolve this issue. If you need further assistance, please post back with a comment to this thread.
If I've managed to answer your question or solve a problem, please take just a moment to rate this post....thanks!
One standard fix to try in this situation is to remove the battery and disconnect the power cable, press the power button for a few seconds, then reconnect without the battery and attempt to reboot. Basic, but sometimes works...Try also reseating the ram, etc. Follow steps outlined here. to diagnose and interpret the led error codes your laptop is returning.
My skills with windows 98 are a bit weak, as I never had a system that ran it, and jumped straight into xp from 3.1. I don't think windows 98 had a recovery console, but if you have the win 98 boot disk you could try to boot from it and see if that works. That would at least help you decide if this is a hardware or software issue, and the boot file can always be repaired using that disk.
Please try to work through some of the troubleshooting steps at this site to diagnose the problem with your computer. Pages here and here may also prove helpful...
ps In windows 98 chkdsk was called scandisk, and that's what you would need to run to check the hard drive for corruption. If that's not the problem, you should be able to salvage all your data from the laptop, even if the motherboard is at fault, by removing the hard drive and running it as a slave drive on another pc, or there are other hard drive data recovery methods available to your local computer tech.
If you google windows 98 - black screen you'll find other steps that may/may not pertain to your situation, but it could have so many causes you'll need to do some troubleshooting from your side to narrow it down, or have somebody local take a look at it for you....
Best of luck!
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What a thorough response you have made. I'm impressed! Let me first say that I am contacting you on my old desktop with windows 98 and explore 6.0. It's slower than molasses and I was unable to find anything on the dell boot to help me. I wish I had done all the other things that you suggested before powering down, but I was so excited to know that my files were still there that I simply did not run a check on the equipment. Basically, I push the on botton on the diverse status there are four things that should light up. Unfortunately, on the power on button lights up. The little symbol next to it, that looks like a drum, tweeks but does not stay on. In looking at the bottom of the computer this little drum indicates the hard drive. Is it not recognizing the harddrive? I get nothing...still a black screen. Your rates are so reasonable I wish I could pay you to help...but alas I have been without a job for over 6 months. Need the laptop and speed to help me find a job....hope you can help! I'm so relieved to know that it's not the mother board.
Carol
I have windows xp?
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