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Question

Dell M4400 Hangs at Welcome Screen

May 11, 2013 4:54AM PDT

So I will sum this up as quickly as possible. I have a background in IT and I've fixed and built plenty of my own machines. But this time I'm stumped. I have a Dell M4400 and I upgraded it from Vista to Windows 7. It was working fine and now it just hangs at the welcome screen when I boot it up. The pointer works, I can even tell things are working in the background because it downloaded and installed some updates when I rebooted it once. Even in safe mode it hangs at the welcome screen.

Then it gets even more weird. I tried to reinstall windows 7 again and even did the repair install. The repair install didn't fix anything. But when I tried to go through a new install it hangs at the screen where I check a box and say I agree to the terms, etc. So that was really odd. I even tried a formatted drive and the new install hung at the same spot for the agreement.

Up until these points everything works. The pointer moves, I can click, but when I click on the user icon on the welcome screen or on the checkbox for the agreement nothing happens. It's very odd. Anyways I have no way of explaining this. It apparently isn't the hard drive. I ran it through memory test, etc. So any suggestions would be great. Thanks guys!

Discussion is locked

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Answer
I had an old shoe.
May 11, 2013 4:57AM PDT

But that doesn't matter. Be sure to give the old hardware settings in the BIOS a try. For example I will disable the onboard sound for a test run. If there is any hardware I can remove or disable I do that.

But it sounds like the machine has some issue. But the clues here do not tell us what it is.
Bob

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BIOS Settings...
May 11, 2013 5:28AM PDT

So there are a TON of BIOS settings. I disabled quite a bit of hardware and tweaked a couple other settings in relation to power. So we'll see what happens. I don't think I've ever seen so many BIOS settings, but that's Dell for ya...

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Answer
Oh, and ran chkdsk...twice
May 11, 2013 5:17AM PDT

The original drive pulls up fine on my other laptop through a usb adapter. Ran chkdsk twice. It finished. Although it did hang at one spot for quite awhile which is why I tried a new drive. It's so weird that both drives hung at the same spot on install. I had borrowed someone's 3rd party power adapter but I can't see how that would affect anything. It doesn't run hot. It allowed me to install windows 7 just fine on that adapter. At some point while sitting on the table waiting for me to install more software it decided to stop going into Windows. I really don't get it.

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That's a clue.
May 11, 2013 5:58AM PDT

Did you get out the canned air and replace the heat sink compound?