Laptop battery dies, then won’t boot Win 7

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I have a Dell XPS laptop running Win 7 64-bit. When we got home from a the weekend, my wife needed to use it, so I booted it up but (I now know) forgot to plug it in. She used it. She logged out of her account. I logged in to my account and locked it. I closed the lid. This morning it was off. When I long-pressed the power button it said the battery was dead. I realized what i had done and plugged in the power. I then long-pressed the power again. I got the Dell XPS screen with the Hit F2 to do this, F12 to do that screen. Then the screen went black however the power button stayed lit. Nothing would work. I waited a few minutes and after no response I hot power…which shut it off. I repeated this again…same results.

Am I hosed or would it just not boot because I hadn’t given the newly plugged in laptop/battery time enough to get enough of a charge to actually boot up. I wasn’t able to wait and try again because I had to get to work (where I am now). I hope it boots normally tonight when I get home.

Does anyone have any thoughts? Am I going to be re-installing Windows? Any comments appreciated.

Thanks.

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I’ve done the same. When the battery was completely flat, my wife’s laptop wouldn’t start. Leaving it for a while solved that problem and it booted normally. Hopefully yours will as well.

Eliminate spare time: start programming PowerShell

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…..and….it won’t boot. Bios start screen then black nothing. I’m running Steve Gibson’s Spinrite on it now. I have good backups of all my data but just hate the T–I–M–E involved in reinstalling Windows…all of the updates, then all my software. I probably will even Spinrite revives it. And if it won’t revive it at least Spinrite offers money back within 30 days.

Anybody know how hard it is to replace a laptop hard drive?…assuming Dell even has the right one still? I’m just not sure I trust this one anymore.

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Will it boot with power connected but battery removed ?

Bruce

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Nope. I’ve started a clean install of Windows 7 with the original disk. When I get to the part about where to install it, there appears to be a partition there but it says it can’t find a partition to install Windows to. I click on the partition and click on Format but nothing happens. I’d think the disk would work if I could only format it. Does anyone know of an NTFS formatting and partitioning tool that can run from a bootable USB stick that launches Win98 to a DOS window? (I created such a stick based on the instructions referenced at GRC.com.
In short, I won’t be able to install Windows until the drive is formatted/partitioned. And the Win 7 install disk won’t do it.

At wits end here.

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Oy! Windows install disk says there’s no partition there to install into. The format option on the Win 7 install disk does nothing. If I delete the apparent partition and recreate it same result. It’s looking more and more like a new hard drive is in my furture. I’ll be visiting the local computer shop after work tonight…hopefully that will be faster than ordering a replacement from Dell and doing it myself. Thanks.

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Normally this problem would indicate a bad or faulty battery, if the unit would power up with out the battery in it. Seeing how it wouldn’t boot with out the battery is a good indicator that the HDD has become corrupted, bad sector or just has crashed and become unrepairable with the missing partitions to reinstall.

If you can pull it out and hook it up to another PC and see if can be accessed. If so, run check disk on it.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee872425.aspx

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/check-your-hard-disk-for-errors

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/guide-to-using-check-disk-in-windows-vista/

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I have a Dell XPS laptop running Win 7 64-bit. When we got home from a the weekend, my wife needed to use it, so I booted it up but (I now know) forgot to plug it in. She used it. She logged out of her account. I logged in to my account and locked it. I closed the lid. This morning it was off. When I long-pressed the power button it said the battery was dead. I realized what i had done and plugged in the power. I then long-pressed the power again. I got the Dell XPS screen with the Hit F2 to do this, F12 to do that screen. Then the screen went black however the power button stayed lit. Nothing would work. I waited a few minutes and after no response I hot power…which shut it off. I repeated this again…same results.

Am I hosed or would it just not boot because I hadn’t given the newly plugged in laptop/battery time enough to get enough of a charge to actually boot up. I wasn’t able to wait and try again because I had to get to work (where I am now). I hope it boots normally tonight when I get home.

Does anyone have any thoughts? Am I going to be re-installing Windows? Any comments appreciated.

Thanks.

I have a Dell Latitude E6510. When my battery is completely dead, I can plug it in and turn it on immediately.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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My first thought wouldn’t have been to reinstall Windows but to boot up with a Repair disk and run the Startup Repair from the Recovery Environment to see what that reported.

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The BEST solution is to recover your partitions with freeware Minitool Partition Wizard
(with luck you will have Windows and all your files working again – unless they are damaged by previous failed remedies)

You can download an ISO and burn a Bootable CD
http://www.partitionwizard.com/partition-wizard-bootable-cd.html

or create a bootable Flash-Drive
http://www.partitionwizard.com/bootable-flash-drive.html

If all else fails those tools should be able to wipe the disk and allow a fresh installation of Windows

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This may be too late, but at any point in this exercise, did you consider stopping, waiting for the battery to recharge, and then try using it normally?
Windows should have shut the system down when the battery went critically low. Do you have that setting disabled by chance (bad idea)?

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Before I started any recovery efforts I let the battery charge for a full day….same results. I have no idea how that setting is set..the laptop won’t boot and Windows install thinks there is no hard drive. Gonna be sorta hard to check that.

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Did you verify that the hard drive is enabled in the BIOS?

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Did you verify that the hard drive is enabled in the BIOS?

yes, it was.

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Although it sounds like you may have already done enough to this drive to prevent recovering anything, it is easy to remove the drive and test it on another computer.
You should be able to boot the other computer and then see if you can read the drive. That will tell you if the HD is dead or not and that will let you know if the issue is with the computer or the drive.

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I’m not an expert on this, but I know if you suddenly lose power while the computer is booting it’s bad news. I’m thinking the battery had just enough power to begin the boot before dying. Several years ago, my daughter’s desktop computer died when a power outage occurred while booting. I was told the boot sector of the hard drive was corrupted, or some such. I got a new hard drive and re-installed XP. Just a thought.

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Shop already replaced it…I had them “recycle” it because apparently I’m evil if I merely throw it in the trash. In any case, I installed Win 7 from my install disk that came with the computer. When it was done, I booted it and it would not connect to the netword thru ethernet. When I looked in Device Mgr I saw that there was no device driver for that. When I put in the device driver disk that came with the computer in it had no drivers for that….and it said I should go to the internet for them. Hello?!? If it won’t connect I can’t go to what it won’t connect to.
It’s back at the shop. I have no patience for this. They are going to get it ready for me to reinstall Office, etc. I used to enjoy this stuff (been messing with computers since Apple II days) but I just don’t have patience for this nonsense anymore. Life’s too busy. It’s already going to take hours to get it back to where it was without these senseless obstacles. My next fear is that the 1080p display won’t do that anymore. But once I can get on the net I can do to Dell and look for drivers. That no net thing was sort of a showstopper.
Thanks for everyone’s suggestions but THE DISK IS GONE at this point.
Tnx agn.

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I know what you mean about needing to find drivers when you have no internet connection. I used to find drivers on another computer and load them on a USB drive, then transfer them to the un-connected one, but I came up with a better method. I bought a decent USB Wireless adapter, which comes with it’s own install CD. That gets any computer I’ve tried it on connected, and quickly. After I’m all set with all my drivers, I can un-install the USB adapter.

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I know what you mean about needing to find drivers when you have no internet connection. I used to find drivers on another computer and load them on a USB drive, then transfer them to the un-connected one, but I came up with a better method. I bought a decent USB Wireless adapter, which comes with it’s own install CD. That gets any computer I’ve tried it on connected, and quickly. After I’m all set with all my drivers, I can un-install the USB adapter.

Great idea! That’s going to be the next item I add to my toolbox.

…/Glitch

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