i need a little help. Neighbor's dell dimension e510 has been acting funny so he called me.

Symptoms:
- Tried to boot it up 10 times... worked once
- When it did boot up it black screen crashed within 10min
- upon turning on the dell meter that is suppose to fill up gets about 1/10 of the way full then stops
- computer makes low emergency alert type sound on turning on

I haven't tried anything yet. I backed up their documents and pictures the one time it did boot up. I figure the hard drive is failing, but wanted to get opinions on what it may be and what to do.

TIA
Namaste, Val

could be a virus or rootkit, have you tried safemode and runing tdsskiller by kapersky and combofix?
these rootkits replace the atapi.sys and iasror.sys whive are drivers for storage controllers.

ater ruling out infection, start removing unneccessary hardware, could be memory, disk, board, graphics card,or cpu. if you can boot into safemode, then it's a possible driver issue

Can't even get to the bios. The dell splash screen (is that what it's called?) comes on and the bar is suppose to fill up (left to right) then it goes into it's regular start-up process. The dell bar won't go past about 10% full though.

remove the harddrive and try booting, if bios comes up fast and fine, then the harddrive is going.
if it still doesn't, check dell website for the latest bios and try flashing it.
if both fails, it has to be the board at that point and you can try resetting th bios jumpers. I had people change shit in bios not knowing the efects it has. (like the movie producer) he'll reset the bios and fuck up the boot order which excludes the raid controller which is home to his boot drive.

thanks harry... i'll give it a try tomorrow =)

could be a bad stick of ram as well, or just not seated properly

update....

worked on the computer today... initial start-up worked then gave me a blue screen of death 5seconds after windows finished loading. Second start-up didn't make it past the dell splash screen. Third and fourth start ups worked fine. Never crashed.

Ran tdsskiller and combofix. tdsskiller said everything is cool. combofix removed one file. combofix is preparing the log report now.

-restarting computer now to see what happens
--Everything seems to be working fine and the neighbor hasn't called to say things have blown up since i left there a half hour ago.

Thanks for the help Harry

if still crashing or acting weird, you can rename the registry fles software and system and default to .old and copy the backup set from a few weeks earlier from the system restore folder, the files are in the snapshot directoy. after renamng them you can see how it boots. this requires removing the drive or using a boot cd like hirens or ubcd4win.

last option is replacing atapi.sys and iastor.sys as they are the latest culprits for being attacked and replaced.

I forget to ask if you remove the hd, does it still hang in bios?

update

Everything was working when i left the other day. Today i've been over there 5 times. Said there was a corrupt system file.... booted up with xp cd to repair. Everything worked then i left. Had to go back a few times when they said it froze. Couldn't start it up a few times. Took out one stick of ram... it worked. Tried the other stick of ram... it worked. Tried both sticks of ram... it worked.
Honestly don't know what the heck is going on.. works when it wants to. Most of the time it'll boot up fine, once in a while it just wont' start.

The bloody thing is four years old and they have a crap ton of non-essential stuff on it (norton this, hp that, backup freeware, etc etc). If i weren't tired of spending so much time over there i'd reformat the whole thing, but totally not gonna do that. I have better stuff to do... like look at kim kardashian's fine ass.

are you getting any disk errors in eventviewer?
if not, I suggest wiping it out. there may be something on it that can't be detected.