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Spent 4 hours on a laptop that wouldn't boot, the fix was a weird BIOS setting
Had a Dell Latitude come in that was stuck on a black screen with a blinking cursor, no matter what I tried. I swapped the drive, tested the RAM, even reflowed the board thinking it was a hardware fault. After like 4 hours, I found a hidden BIOS option called 'USB Boot Support' that was set to 'Disabled' for some reason. Flipping it on let the drive boot right up. Has anyone else run into a random BIOS toggle causing a total no-boot like that?
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rayy837d ago
That whole hidden BIOS menu thing is a real trip... reminds me of an old HP desktop that would only boot from a specific SATA port. Spent a whole afternoon on it before finding some "legacy port" setting buried three menus deep. Makes you wonder who decides these defaults and why they hide the useful stuff.
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holly_foster7d ago
Oh man, that legacy port setting is a classic. Always check for "SATA operation" or "storage options" menus, they love to hide the AHCI/RAID/Legacy IDE toggle there. On some Dells, you have to disable "Secure Boot" first just to see the other boot options. It's like they assume no one ever adds an old hard drive.
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