Dell Inspirion 510m-no boot-bsod

Redisle

I was asked to take a look at a teachers laptop in school,a dell inspirion 510m... Basically the problem is windows dosent even boot... the laptop powers on and goes to the black windows screen where you choose safe mode etc but no option wrks... i try normal windows... it starts to load then bsod... same with safe mode and last known config.. the bsod tells me to run checkdisk and check recently installed hardware etc....
So i couldnt do anything with it today...
Now what im planning on doing tomorrow at lunch is try and figure out whats going on... i am planning on running memtest to see if the memry is acting up and im going to bring an xp disk and try the recovery console and/or a repair install....

The thing is im not sure if its a hardware or software problem..
So what do you guys think?? Any other diagnostics i can run to find out whats wrong??? i need replies asap because as i said its tomorrw im doing it..

thanks for any help,
ab

ondafly

thats the 3rd 510m I've heard/seen this month. All BSOD, the 2 I dealt with, the hard-drives were knackered. Making that lovely clicking noise of doom

Redisle

hmm no clicking noise i dont think... that was the first thing i asked him....

TempestSabre

Run a mem test, a HD test, run a live linux CD and see if that works. etc.

Redisle

TempestSabre wrote:

Run a mem test, a HD test, run a live linux CD and see if that works. etc.

okay will do...