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General discussion

cant boot up vista

Dec 10, 2009 9:06PM PST

can somebody please help. I turned the computer off last night and this morning it will not boot up. i tried the cd that came with the computer and that will not work either. thought i would repair the computer that way.
my computer is a dell dimension e520 vista home basic.
is there a way to get to dos to format the hard drive.

Discussion is locked

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DOS is no longer used.
Dec 10, 2009 10:51PM PST

The Vista OS is usually a bootable DVD. If that fails to boot we look again to the CMOS boot settings and then test with other bootable media. The DVD drives lose boot capability under a few conditions so we fix that first since this feature is how we'll reload the OS or repair it.

Fix the non-booting OS DVD first.
Bob

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dvd works
Dec 11, 2009 12:30AM PST

thank you for your reply the dvd drive works its loads the files then the screen goes blank and that is it. really i am lost in how to fix it.

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Still need to fix the boot DVD first.
Dec 11, 2009 12:40AM PST

So it boots to a blank screen. That's been spotted with machines that have USB devices plugged in or other hardware failures.

Try unplugging USB things and take the machine BACK TO STOCK.
Bob

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vista help
Dec 11, 2009 4:47AM PST

I have unpluged all usbs still does not work. could you tell me how i put it back to factory settings
thanks from karen

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About page 55 at link
Dec 11, 2009 4:51AM PST