computer crashed - help would be greatly appreciated!

Hi guys -

I have a Dell Latitude 100L 20Gig harddrive, 256 ram (not sure the processor)

While writing a word document (nothing fancy) the computer froze up last week. After a hard restart, a black screen came up, the fans went on, but computer would not boot. Over the next few days, after waiting several hours or overnight, the comuter would startup and get to various levels of the boot process (sometimes the dell screen, sometimes the windows screen, once all the way to the desktop) before freezing up and dying. It seemed that the longer we let it sit, the further it would boot.

One time we got the following error:
Memory address line failure at 17eeoo30, read 00000000 expecting 11111111
Memory odd/even logic failure at 001e0000 - 001effff

(etc.....)

This led me to believe it was the RAM that had pooped. This computer had 2 128mg RAM chips in 2 DIMMs - we bought a new 512mg ram chip and replaced the chip in DIMM2 - when that didn't work, DIMM 1 - switching them around in every possible combination to no avail.

The main objective is to simply get the files off the harddrive, so when replacing the RAM didn't work, we bought an external enclosure at the local computer shop. WHen i plug it into a computer, the drive shows up, but not all the files are there. At first glance the drive looks normal, but when i go to the desktop or my documents, (through docs and settings) there are no files there. All the program folders seem to be present, but there is little or no content in these folders. Is there something special i have to do to get these files off of here? Where are they hiding? Or is there a quick obvious fix to get the original laptop up and running? file recovery is definitely of the essence, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

thanks alot, all!

laura

 

have you try to push f8 when your booting up and go to last configuration that worked.

 

If that doesn't work, try a restore..although you might lose what was in the document you were working on

 

the computer will not even boot to the point of getting to press f8. it either freezes before it will respond to f8, or when we tried booting the computer just now, we got another memory address line failure. I googled this, and it brought up a list from the dell website that said that the cause for the error message is a "Faulty or improperly seated SIMMs or defective system board." Is a SIMM the same as a DIMM? waht does this mean? is a system board the same as a motherboard? any hope of salvaging this computer or data?

thanks,
laura

 

simm is single inline memory module and dimm is dual inline memory module.doesn't really matter though. and a system board is the same as a motherboard or mobo for short. Do you have another computer that you could test the ram and hard drive out on? If so see if they work on that pc and if they do then you know it's the mobo. Although it sounds to me like the hard drive is about dead.