DotDragnet
May 24, 2012, 04:22:18 AM *
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Mobile users - Our forum is Tapatalk enabled. http://www.tapatalk.com/
 
   Home   Help Search Login Register  
Pages: [1]   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: Non Booting Laptop....sort of  (Read 430 times)
slaughteredlamb
DDN Contributor
Hero Member
*****
Posts: 1089



peakoverload
View Profile WWW Awards
« on: April 20, 2011, 03:42:05 PM »

Okay this one has me stumped.

We have 3x Dell Latitude laptops all on docking stations all working fine. Then one of them decided to crash and now won't boot into Windows and goes to a black screen after the Windows XP splash screen. Classic graphics driver issue which seemed to be even more likely seeing as it happily boots into Windows in Safe Mode everytime. So downloaded the latest Nvidia drivers, reinstalled, rebooted, same problem.

So PC just goes to a black screen after XP splash screen. The monitor doesn't loose sync so it at least thinks it's getting a signal but it's not displaying it.

Take the computer off the docking station and boot it up and it boots into Windows fine. Connect a monitor directly to the laptop (VGA only) and it boots up fine.

Put the computer back onto the docking station boot up using a DVI cable doesnt work, reboot but this time use a VGA cable, doesn't work.

Replace docking station using same VGA and DVI cables, same thing, doesn't work on either.

Take the computer to a different room with a different docking station and a different VGA cable, boots up fine  shocking shocking

WTF! How can two docking stations not work when one does and both 'not working' docking stations work with other laptops? It's not the cables because I've replaced them with known working ones and the same cables that didn't work with the docking station work when connected directly to the laptop.

Anyone have any ideas what the hell is going on?
Logged
neal
Sr. Member
****
Posts: 300



nealio82
View Profile Awards
« Reply #1 on: April 20, 2011, 04:41:28 PM »

Are the docking stations in the other room the same make/model?

Without actually knowing if your docking stations require drivers, I'm taking a shot in the dark and saying it sounds most like a driver issue with the docking stations. Replace/Update the driver for the docking station on the laptop that crashed & see what happens (of course there might not be a specific driver for the actual docking station, but a generic Windows driver which could be at fault) - this seems quite likely if the docking station, and therefore the driver, were in use at the time of the crash.
Logged

sig edited due to migrating from .net
Pages: [1]   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by MySQL Powered by PHP Powered by SMF | SMF © 2006-2008, Simple Machines Valid XHTML 1.0! Valid CSS!