Dell Vostro 3500 will not boot from any devices

[Knarmahfox]

Before I begin, I am a moderate computer literate person and I only will post on forums if i become stuck beyond my knowledge.

I have a Dell Vostro 3500 intel i3

Before this all happned I had my laptop with me using battery power and recording on it using a software called reason. My battery was depleting so I continued to use it till it died. I tried to start it up after i plugged it in and I didnt have my charger plugged in so the PC continued to boot and warned me that the battery was low and began to boot windows 7. before i could check the charger the computer died before loading windows. After that the PC never booted to windows and I kept getting the "PXE Error-E61 Media test failure. Check Cable".

I should have done more research before assuming it was the Hard Drive. But i went out and purchased a new one assuming it was because it couldnt find a boot device. NO GOOD.

I DISABLED Integrated NIC in BIOS and the PXE error-e61 was resolved. But I STILL CANNOT boot from ANY other device, CD Rom, and external. It keeps telling me to Select PROPER boot device or press any key to retry. This makes it seem like BIOS is trying to boot from a predetermined device? Which would lead to my next question, Is there a master reset for BIOS?

I have tried removing the CMOS battery, Reseting bios to defaults, changing the last boot to network, manually selecting the boot from the F12 option before the computer boots. Im at a loss the only other idea i have is that the MoBo is bad or a component on the MoBo is damaged some how.

I also ran the Diagnostics within bios and no errors came back. The only errors i have to go off of are the PXE-E61 error and the no boot device.

Am I missing any steps or troubleshooting?

ANY IDEAS??

Thanks

 

[Laptop_Nerd]

Hi,

Here's my share of some troubleshooting step you might want to try.

1. Make sure that HDD is listed first in BIOS cause if not re-seat it then, unplug it then plug it back in.
2. If HDD being detected together with the DVD Driver in the boot order make sure that ONLY the HDD and DVD Drive is where PC would boot from.
3. Disable the NIC from BIOS as well.
4. Do reset BIOS settings which you already did before by removing the CMOS battery and putting it back in.
5. The error you're getting has something 2 to with the cable and it's constantly trying to boot in your Network and since that's a laptop it means the connection from the HDD to the motherboard which is held be a solder.
6. Your theory would be correct if all these steps failed which is the motherboard is faulty already.