Black Screen of Death -- Part II

A couple of people have asked exactly what was the problem with my Dell XPS 410 yesterday. I realize now that I never really said. So, for those who care, here it is in a nutshell.

The problem was in the boot sequence. Now we don't know if the sequence was actually changed or if there is something wrong with the BIOS that is suddenly causing the problem. Whichever, it boils down to this: the first item on the boot sequence was the CD-ROM drive. It appears that the system refused to go forward to the next item in the sequence even though there was no disk in the drive. We moved the SATA Hard drives to first place and pushed the CD-ROM drive down to second, rebooted and we still had the same problem. We then moved Intel ARRAY to first, SATA to second and CD-ROM to third and the system booted just fine.

So, as I said yesterday, the problem is corrected, but we don't know what actually caused it in the first place.