I think it crashed. Dell Vostro 1000

[hazmaster]

I am definately a novice at fixing computers. Any help would be appreciated.

I have a Dell Vostro 1000 that won't boot up. When I start up, it acts like it will boot normally then a blue screen pops up and and tells me the beep.sys file is damaged. It has instructions on what to do but when I try, it ends up back at the same scree.

My question is can a connect another identical laptop somehow and repair the damged file using the good laptop for commands since I can do nothing with mine? If the two can be connected, will the damaged one act as a drive off the good one? I need any help I can get as I can do absolutley nothing with the damaged one. Please help.

Thank you

 

[dwellman]

Ideally, you could boot from the Windows installation CD and use either a 1) Automated Recovery Disk (floppy disks with files to copy) or 2) the Recovery Console and replace the corrupt file manually.

Sometimes, that is not possible due to the nature of OEM's typical recovery options. So another option emerges: take the hard drive with the fault OS and mount it on another system running the same OS with an equivilant SP level and copy the file from the good running OS to the bad one.

%systemroot%\system32\drivers\beep.sys should be the proper location.

[EDIT]Oops, I said 'copy' when I meant 'replace'

 

[hazmaster]

Don't mean to sound ignorant but I'm not sure how to do what you suggested as far as switching hard drives. The most I have ever done to the inside of a computer is add memory. What do you mean by an equivilant SP level. Don't know what SP is.

Thanks for the advice.

 

[dwellman]

SP = Service Pack. The most recent service pack for Vista is SP1. The most recent Service Pack for XP is SP3.

Almost all laptop hard drives are easily assessible by removing a few screws (1 or 2 screws, usually) removing a cover and extracting the caddy-- most laptop drives live in a caddy.

You need the Service Manual. You can get it by selecting your preferred language and then downloading the Service Manual from here.

[EDIT] Or here's a direct link:
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/vos1000/en/sm_en/hddrive.htm#wp1131908