My Dad is 80 years old, legally blind and his computer won’t boot. I am open, very open to suggestions on how to proceed. My dad lives in one state, I live in another state. I need help with a plan.
My dad’s computer is a Dell Dimension 5150 with a RAID 1 mirror setup.
Booting to the hard drive – BSOD; Booting to Safe Mode – BSOD; Booting to a USB Flash Drive with a Bart’s PE build – boots but no hard drive because the build lacks the raid controller driver; booting to the DVD drive – boots but again no hard drive.
I was able to boot to the diagnostics partition, run diagnostics and everything passed.
I pulled one of the hard drives, and then used a USB docking station to confirm the drive was readable. I did a manual copy of the drive to my spare usb drive.
I went into the BIOS and to the best of my knowledge removed the remaining drive from the RAID hoping the problem might have been the RAID controller. I did not pull this 2nd hard drive to confirm this drive was readable. Booting to the remaining hard drive – BSOD;
I did not pull the memory to reseat them.
I did not attempt to repair or rebuild the operating system.
I did not confirm the 2nd remaining hard drive was readable.
At the moment, I am back home and trying to decide whether to declare my dad’s computer dead or work to salvage it. I am anticipating issues with some of his legacy applications saved files to work with the current versions on a new computer. If I can get dad’s computer to boot, then export/backup the legacy application then they should import into the current application version.
Your thoughts and suggestions are appreciated.
