Hey there, hopefully this will be my last post for a while. Needing to ask all these questions makes me feel like a bit of a dingus. Over break, by sister got a new laptop, as her old one has a half-broken hinge, and the battery has been charged too many times. I had a step-dad a few years ago, who passed away. His old laptop is one that I had been using for a while, but last year it stopped booting into windows. This wasn't a big deal, because we had another laptop that would work, even though it was slightly older. The older one is basically completely destroyed now, so that is out of the question of repair. The first laptop that died was a Dell XPS 1340. My sister's laptop was a Dell Vostro 3500. I thought that the issue with the XPS would be either a hard drive issue, or a RAM issue. I have tried switching the RAM and hard drive from the Vostro to the XPS, to no avail. Both were running windows 7, although, I don't think it matters much, since I don't know where the XPS drive is. (We have moved a couple of times since I took the XPS drive out) with the Vostro hard drive and several RAM DIMM switches (tried all of them individually in all of the slots, and variations thereof) I have been getting the same bluescreen that flashes for an instant. I'm not sure what the program is called that boots, so that you can read the bluescreen clearly, so I have not been able to try that yet (I don't have a readily available USB drive at the moment) however, I did take a video and can pause it at the image of the bluescreen, although the frame is not fully drawn, so I don't have the full image. This is what it says, that I can read: {A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer. If this is the first time you've seen this stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps: Check for viruses on your computer. remove any newly installed hard drives, or hard drive controllers. Check your hard drive to make sure it is properly configured and terminated. Run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart your computer.} Is there a possibility of a virus on something other than a hard drive? When the XPS first died I remember seeing this screen flash (I cannot verify that the text was the same, however I suspect that it was) The hard drive and RAM from the Vostro should be good, since I took it out, and moved it over to the XPS within the span of 20 minutes. Aside form the battery, and hinge issue, the Vostro is in full working order. The hardware spec is, if I recall correctly, higher on the XPS than the Vostro. would it just be better to cut my losses and get a new battery for the Vostro and just deal with that, or should I continue down this path with the XPS Frankenstein?
if you don't have restore disks or a windows install disc, you need to try & run windows in safe mode (without hardware drivers basically), press & hold F8 during startup, then once you're in remove all the drivers, when you restart it should try & detect all the new hardware. I suspect the issue you have is that at one or more of the drivers will be incompatible with the system you are attempting to boot the hdd in.
Thanks a lot for the advice! I am pretty swamped with school at the moment, but I will try that as soon as the weekend comes around, or I get some free time. I will update again then. If anybody has some more ideas that I could try as well, they are very welcome!
