dell inspiron 7500, cyclic rebooting

[l3ement]

to make a long story short, this question does not pertain to the linux operating system, just the laptop it was placed on. my inspiron is doing this annoying cyclic rebooting deal. i turn it on and all i get is the hopes and sounds of a typical boot up, but the screen does not turn on and then it shuts off; only to do the exact same thing over and over until a: the battery dies or b: you remove any source of power. of course this has to happen the last day of my vacation and right before i get back to work. any help is so greatly appreciated!

[bascule]

Could be one of many things, can you get into the BIOS or not even that far?

[johnfn]

if you have a floppy drive, try to insert a boot disc (if you dont have one, ut oh). does it even get to the bios? try pressing F2 or F12, or DEL, or something, to get to the bios configuration. then configure it to boot off your floppy drive (or maybe cdrom). You might, if your really lucky, get to command prompt, and from there try to delete the offending program.
good luck...

[root.veg]

Wow. *exact* same thing is happening to me. Looks like I am the proud inheritor of a laptop of the same model, which they don't need at work anymore.

It just so happens I found the following site:

http://ag.cs.uvic.ca/~dmg/brick/

...find the bit where the guy describes his experience when trying to upgrade memory. He *thought* that there were 3 RAM slots, 1 on-board and 2 user-accessible. He was expecting to see two empty memory slots, but found one already occupied. When he removed the "extra" RAM, his Inspiron did exactly the same cyclic-rebooting thing.

So... I open up my "new" Inspiron, and hey-presto, there's no "extra" RAM in it. And it's quite likely that there *used* to be some "extra" RAM in it... our IT support guy is pretty smart, and would of course try and re-use anything like that before getting rid of the main box (the thing didn't even come with a hard drive, for a start!).

So to test this hypothesis I need to borrow some laptop RAM to stick in the extra slot and see if it solves the problem.

Promise I'll post back whether it works or not.

[root.veg]

Short answer: stick some RAM in it.

Long answer:

I took a 64MB SODIMM RAM card from my Dad's laptop, and put it into my new (old!) Inspiron in slot 1. No change.

Swapped the RAM card into slot 2, and bingo, I get a BIOS splash screen and I can boot up from tomsrtbt (on floppy) or from Knoppix. No probs mounting the hard drive, either.

After booting, both Knoppix and tomsrtbt reckoned the machine only had 64MB RAM, which indicates that either there's no on-board RAM, or it's there and doesn't work.

Anyway, your mileage may vary, so do try and borrow a RAM card to test it out before you go and blow your cash on some new gear.

Now I've gotta go RAM shopping, maybe even get an ethernet card too. Oh yeah, and a modem that doesn't suck. And a power pack. But then I'm done. :)

[root.veg]

... another word of caution.... I've since borrowed some different makes of SODIMM RAM, which *didn't* work when I installed them. Depending on which make I tried, and which slot it went in, the laptop either continued with the cyclic reboot, or got through LILO, but then gave up with memory-related errors quite early on in the boot sequence.

All I'm saying is, *definitely* try before you buy. Those Dells seem to be awfully picky about RAM.