Was working last night. Turned on today and got a blue screen with error message. Pressed F12 and ran tests. At end of tests I was told to contact manufacturer. I have tried to reboot and can't I've turned the unit off and then back on and now it is in an endless cycle to boot up. (I see the dell bar going across the screen over and over and over)

If your computer is showing nothing on screen it is not booting up OK. Are there any beep codes being given during bootup? One single beep at the end of the POST sequence is OK, anything more means some kind of hardware error found during bootup. Media Direct 3 is a Dell product that has caused a number of problems on its computers. See Dell MediaDirect . Your option may be limited to contacting Dell support.

It appears the screen has packed up,you need to take it to a repair shop.

Driver or software update that was incompatible can cause this, try to boot to F8 and run a disk check.
Also failing ram can cause this, check the ram modules using Mem test

use GENUINE cartrigdges

Try this do this when the bios is booting up before the windows.. press F8 then start windows in safemode with command and pronpt then after that on the blackscreen if command and prompt type this

chkdsk /f or chkdsk /r

then press enter
then press Y and enter and reboot the computer and wait for it to repair the errors
.
plese let me know it this work.

immediately run a diagnostics for the hdd alone power on laptop then keep tapping F12 then run the diagnostics. if no errors found then.
try this. power on laptop then keep tapping on F8 to boot options then select last known good configuration. if same problem then boot in F8 then safe mode if still the same problem. use now the OS disc to do startup repair. Boot F12 then select DVD drive in booting make sure the OS media is already on the driver. then just select repair computer then make startup repair. if all fails this might end up reinstalling OS as clean installation.

it sounds like the easiest solution would to either run the repair sequence from a windows xp disk (may not be a perminant fix) if that doesent work just use the xp disk to format the drive and install a new operating system

it's not on 'test' is it,
try turning the machine on while pressing the start and on buttons together until dOFF apears.

Hi there, and welcome to FixYa,

DST stands for Drive Self Test, if it fails the test it means your drive is failing.

1. Do you have access to a Windows CD?
If so you can try to boot to the recovery console and run chkdsk /r.
Hopefully you can get it to boot, backup what you need, - then replace the drive.

2. Another solution could bee, - a bit more aggressive,
Reinstall your OS.

3. or - it could just be an error that can’t be fixed. I would get a new disk, install my OS, set the other as slave, and get the needed files.

regards
Teis
Don’t forget to vote if this help you.

I too have the same problem with the blue screen and also some dots in the center of the screen. I went to the sony site (www.sony.com) and found the answer. They will repair the unit until Dec 31, 2008. hope this helps