Need help with a sick Dell E310 With XP Media Center 2005

Trying to help a friend with a Jacked up machine.
So I bring it home and notice first off it has no PS2 ports so I round up a USB keyboard and mouse.

Boot the PC and keyboard and mouse light up at post but don't function at the Windows login screen. In fact the lights go out during windows loading.

So I say OK USB drivers are corrupt.
I have a copy of Media Center OEM so I throw it in the machine and kick off a repair install. I wonder at the F6 screen if I should have had a SATA driver but let it go to see what happens. Wow it found the windows installation cool.
So I let it go through all the motions and when I get to the screen where it wants the OS key I use the key on the side of the machine. Everything is all good and I have mouse and keyboard at this point.

So it reboots and I get a message that I need to activate windows before I can log in. I click ok and boom.... blue screen. So I reboot in safe mode and I still cant log in because windows cant activate in safe mode.

So I'm stuck. Can't boot in normal mode to activate because I get a blue screen and I cant boot in safe mode because it isn't activated.

Only thing I can think of without starting from scratch is repeat the repair install and load some drivers at F6 but I have no idea what.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

Hey I had a thought. What if I rolled back the clock in bios. Could I get it up in safe mode then?

 

Odd ....... I've never seen one that wouldn't boot safe mode due to activation.

I'm guessing that it automatically restarts rather than display an error message at the blue screnn, else you'd have mentioned the error. Use F8 at startup to enable the Advanced Start Menu then select 'Disable automatic restart'. This should throw up an error message when it BSODs. Post the entire message here.

 

Hmm,
I tried to restart again today and now no mouse or keyboard again.

The owner is bringing me the OEM disks tomorrow. I don't give up easy so I'm a long ways from a clean install.

 

The USB stops working, then basic drivers cannot be installed for connecting to the internet.

If there are any add-in (PCI) cards, remove them until you get into Windows.

I would recommend you replace the CMOS battery.

Check in the BIOS/Startup settings that hardware seems to be set correctly.

Matt

 

Matt thanks for the help.

There are no add on cards. This is an out of the box stock Dimension E310.
Although I'm getting tempted to get a PCI card for PS2 support!
The USB keyboard works fine in Bios. It even works at the F8 screen. Then it dies during the XP splash screen.

 

Well this PC has been sitting over in the corner and I need to get it back to it's owner.

I now have the OEM USB keyboard and mouse.
The keyboard works in post and the F8 screen but not in windows safe or normal!

Plese give me some suggestions!

 

Well I'm making progress.

I rolled back the bios clock to 2005. Kicked off another repair install. The repair install got my keyboard and mouse back and rolling the clock back allowed me to get into the system so I could call Microsoft and activate.

So far so good. Just running the tons of windows updates and cleaning up spyware.

 

Glad to hear you got 'er jump started.

Ummm, have you not downloaded SP3 iso and burnt a cd yet?