by stevensonnz » Wed Dec 05, 2007 9:55 am
Aha! Someone else is experiencing this as well!! I'm sorry I can't yet provide you with a solution, only reassurance that it's not just you. I bought my Amilo in August and it died at the beginning of October with the exact symptoms you described. Tech support talked me through all sorts, but nothing worked so it went back under warranty (very efficient, away 9 days). Came back with a replacement hard drive and was working again. Since then I wanted to run XP rather than Vista, so bought a second hard drive and installed XP on it, keeping the original (replaced) HDD with Vista on, in case it needs to go back under warranty again.
Last night I powered up and once again got that feeling in the pit of my stomach as it demonstrated the same symptoms once again -- dead. Disconnected the battery and then re-powered and it would get to the Fujitsu-Siemens boot screen, get so far and then die again. I re-tried and this happened a few more times, so I went in to setup to see if it was a BIOS thing, but the only thing I noticed was that the boot order was USB first. So I changed it to HDD first. I know this shouldn't really make any difference, because it will try all locations in the list, but hey.
It now booted and displayed one of those error screens, something about Windows not shutting down properly or something, so I rebooted in 'Last known good configuration'. I can't remember if this worked (!) but I do remember eventually booting into safe mode and doing a system restore to an earlier date which was successful. It booted OK and was working fine. I'm dreading getting home tonight and powering up...... Will it, won't it? We shall see......
Sorry to ramble on a bit, but maybe my experience will be of help. I'm going to keep searching for solutions because there's obviously a fault somewhere if others are having the same expeience. It's dented my confidence in Fujitsu Siemens a bit though... Other than this problem I'm pleased with it.