Lights flash i have no idea of what happened, but on the face of the laptop, dell 9400, there is a button called ''media direct''. directly to the right, are 5 symbols. 2 of these symbols are an ''A'' inside of a lock, and a down arrow, also inside of what appears to be a lock. they both keep blinking when i attempt to turn on my dell 9400 laptop and the laptop wont work. in fact, after about 15 seconds the laptop dies.

it shows power section issue of motherboard

There are two possible causes for this issue:
1) Your dell 9400 charger is malfunction
2) Your laptop dc power jack is loose or dead

Possible troubleshooting step:
1) Borrow a compatible dell charger to plug in your laptop, if it works without any issue, it means your dell inspiron 9400 adapter need to be replaced.

2) If the compatible dell 9400 charger won't work normally, the problem may lie in your dc power jack.

Hope this will help.

there is

start up in safe mode. log in and go to start>run>msconfig

go to services and click hide all microsoft services kill all dell services then go to start up and again kill all dell stuff

click apply then restart

log in as normal

your system should be fixed

probably the CPU was broken.

Make sure you do not have a bootable CD or DVD in the drive. If that does not resolve, then try holding the "home" (Media Direct) button while pressing the Power button on.

This is a known problem my friend... The Dell Media Direct Software requires a different partition to work (except version 4.0) so here is what you need to do... You need to boot using the Dell Media Direct Disk n let it create a partition for itself... then go about reinstalling your OS n then once the OS is installed then pop the Dell Media Direct disk back in again n complete the installation....

Hope this answers your query :-)

Usually Media Direct is pre-installed on a Dell Portable System. It is installed on a media direct partition. If you reinstalled windows and if you formatted yor hard drive then you may have to reinstall media direct in 2 different ways.

Media direct 2 requires to have windows installed first.
Media direct 3 requires to have the Media Direct CD run first.

sounds like bad motherboard/power supply. Just to be sure though have you upgraded the ram? If you have more then one memory chip try siwtching out each one and seeing if it's boot farther. It's possible a dimm went bad or the port it's in went bad. Otherwise motherboard/powersupply

usualy its the dc jack aka direct current jack (the plug behind laptop is broken)

i suggest that you should replace the battery because batterey may be faulty take it down to your nearest pc repair shop