Dell Laptop not working

Hey, I've been banging my head around for a couple days on this one now I have to throw it out to you guys. I have a Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop I got about 3 years ago for free from a friend. Anyway I had Ubuntu 9.04 on it and decided I needed to put XP back on it because I use a few programs for work and I've never been able to get them to work under WINE. Now when I formatted the drive everything was good. Then when I tried to install XP I started having problems. If I try to run the install from the CDROM I get the Press any key to boot from CD message, when I press a key it spins up the drive then the computer just stops and sits there. I thought maybe I was having an issue with the disk so I made a flash drive install and tried that. When it tried to boot from the USB same thing, the system just stops. No beeps or messages. On person I was talking to at work suggested the Southbridge might be going bad but I'm not sure. I checked over the motherboard and can't see anything wrong there and all the drives are pressed into place. Any suggestions out there or should I just throw it on ebay as a parts or repair?

How did you create the flash drive? From the XP CD? It could be that the data is corrupt somehow. That's when I have those kinds of issues anyways.

You could try installing Windows 7 RC. I'm not sure if its still free or not, but I'm sure you could find a copy around somewhere. It looks like you can get the product key until October from MS website so you just need to track down a copy of the software. Anyways, if you can do that, then you'll know if its software related or hardware related. I suppose you could try installing any kind of OS to test that though.

Maybe the hard drive is bad if its not software related?

When I installed Win7 onto my Ubuntu drive, I had to delete the partition and all of that first. Maybe that's your problem. It was under advanced options when installing or something like that. After I deleted the partition or whatever it installed perfectly.

One other thing probably worth checking - does the laptop have any kind of BIOS protection options relating to OS installation? Some have a setting you have to change to allow the installation of a new OS...

I had Windows 7 for a while but it only has 512MB RAM and it ran real slow. I've tried 3 different install CDs. I'll do some more digging around and find my Ubuntu install and see if that will read to the LiveCD.

How often do you/did you actually use the optical drive in the laptop? Is it possible it is faulty but you never noticed because you rarely use it? I bought a brand new laptop about 4 months ago, and I can probably count on the fingers of one hand how many times I've actually used it's all singing DVDRW/Bluray drive - in fact, other than creating the factory restore disks from the onboard software, I'm not sure I've used it at all....

Not very often actually. Most of my disks I have copied into ISOs and keep on flash or SD cards because its easier to carry around instead of worrying about breaking or scrathing CDs.

If the laptop has a floppy drive, try making the six boot disks for that (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310994). It's interesting that it starts the setup from the CD and USB but hangs, I suspect driver issues or HDD problems. If there's no floppy drive or it just doesn't work, try freeDOS and a disk repair utility on your USB to make sure the HDD is up to par. Or you could try swapping out the HDD for a known working drive if possible. If this all fails, then it's crystal clear that I have no idea what I'm talking about. :)

It's weird but I tried all of my XP disks and non of them wanted to work. But I put in my Windows 7 disk and it worked fine. So long story short the system is up and running again. Thanks everyone for the suggestions.

Since you installed this back in September, that version of Windows 7 is probably going to stop working this month or next. You may have to reinstall again.

Are your XP disks Dell disks? Also, did you have any USB devices plugged into the laptop when you booted to the Windows XP install? It sounds like your disks might be bad since the Windows 7 worked fine.

I have the Windows 7 RC, should be ok till next July and I'll have some cash saved up because I need to buy a copy for my main rig too. If I ever have the $$ for 3 copies and the HTPC I want to build I'll need all of them.

Be aware lol - as I found out the other day, not only does the RC die utterly in June, it apparently starts a 2 hour restart cycle from 1st March....

There's a 3 machine family licence pack available here in the UK - I expect it'll be available in the US too - only Home Premium but enough for most peoples needs

Home premium is probably all I'll need, I'll keep an eye out of the 3 pack. Thanks for the heads up on that.

I'll probably get one myself, altho for the wife, my son, and the HTPC - not sure what I'm doing for my PC and the laptop just yet