Help With Dell XPS

So, i got a dell XPS that had some issues. i dont know exactly what, just that they couldnt figure it out, but think it was a hard drive problem. furthermore, they pulled the harddrive out of it so no information was left on it when disposed of.

what can i do to make this thing work? or see if it actually was a Harddrive problem? I want to avoid buying a hard drive until i know that rest of the comp is in working condition.

i was thinking, maybe get some software, maybe ubuntu, or something, on a external drive and try to boot it through that. or is it possible to boot it through another laptop? but after those thoughts im lost on what and how to do...

any suggestions?

 

Burn linux to a CD and boot off of it. It should allow you to see if the computer works.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

You might be able to install to a SD card as well. I've never tried it so I'm not sure if the computer will boot it or not.

http://pandorawiki.org/Running_Linux_from_an_SD_card

 

Sweet. And through a cd it should work even without a hard drive?

 

It should.

You could just turn it on as well. You'll get an error about not being able to find a boot device but if the screen has text on it, you can be relatively confident that the screen works. You can enter into the bios as well. It should give a colored screen (I believe it's F11 on a Dell). You should be able to see the prompt at boot up.

In fact, any OS install disk should be able to boot off your CD enough to see if the graphics screen works properly. It'll be bare-bones unless you can install it to something, which is why I suggested trying to install to a high capacity SD card and see if the computer will boot off of it. That would give you some drivers for your hardware.

You could even try a Windows install disk if you have one lying around.

Some software like Norton Ghost will boot up to an Ansi style graphical screen. It has it's own OS on the CD. It doesn't do much but you'll be able to check a color display.

You might have to change your bios settings if the CD boot is disabled.

 

What is the problem? Will it not boot up at all? Do you still have the wiped hard drive in there? Or any hard drive at all?

My advice would be to download and burn windows 7 onto a cd from your laptop. Put the cd in your xp, and Then go to your bios ( should be f2, f8, or delete depending on which computer you have) and make sure boot by cd is your first boot device. Next attempt to install a fresh windows on your external hard drive and see if that works. (make sure you have everything backed up you want to keep on your external hard drive).

Also, do you know what model of xps it is?

 

Ya there is no hard drive in it. And I have it the computer at home. So I'll be looking into this tomoro and see what I can do and I'll let u know what xps it is.