Latitude E6400 Cable - RTC Battery was not detected

Ron Hardin

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Oct 17, 2015, 1:10:38 PM10/17/15

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Windows XP won't boot successfully (BSOD) on the
old Latitude E6400

Both onboard and DVD diagnostics find

Error Code 0600-5127
CABLE - RTC battery was not detected

under cable tests. The CMOS stuff otherwise seems
to be working correctly. System time and date in
BIOS are good, all the pre-boot things work right,
and it boots fine to diagnostics from the CD
drive.

But XP won't boot with whatever the problem is.
It starts its display and then BSOD's.

Guesses? I'll order a battery but it doesn't look
like a dead battery is the problem.
--
rhha...@mindspring.com

On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.

Ron Hardin

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Oct 18, 2015, 6:57:36 AM10/18/15

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Ron Hardin wrote:
>
> Windows XP won't boot successfully (BSOD) on the
> old Latitude E6400
>
> Both onboard and DVD diagnostics find
>
> Error Code 0600-5127
> CABLE - RTC battery was not detected
>
> under cable tests. The CMOS stuff otherwise seems
> to be working correctly. System time and date in
> BIOS are good, all the pre-boot things work right,
> and it boots fine to diagnostics from the CD
> drive.
>
> But XP won't boot with whatever the problem is.
> It starts its display and then BSOD's.
>
> Guesses? I'll order a battery but it doesn't look
> like a dead battery is the problem.

I tried the repair console from the XP DVD, and ran through
chkdsk /r, fixmbr, fixboot, with no improvement. But the machine
itself seems to do all that okay. Maybe the diagnostic fault
is just a nothing problem unrelated to not booting XP without
BSOD.

Right now it's trying a repair installation and seems to be
going okay at it. Question, it seems to be using existing
drivers (the video quality is good, wifi light comes on, etc).

Do I reinstall the Dell drivers or are they already there after
a repair install? Assuming it comes up of course.

Ron Hardin

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Oct 18, 2015, 11:13:58 AM10/18/15

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It seems to work without installing any Dell drivers.

IE was broken (I guess from having IE8 components and SP3's IE6 repair reinstallation).

To recover from that use www.wsusoffline.net version 9.2.1.

Once IE8 is working, then you can get to windows update.

Lesson, get a USB stick of wsusoffline for XP.

Ben Myers

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Oct 18, 2015, 11:41:43 PM10/18/15

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Ron,

I would still reinstall all the drivers, starting with the Intel chipset, then reboot, then all the rest (audio, Ethernet, video, wifi) without an intervening reboot. Then a final reboot.

Ron Hardin

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Oct 19, 2015, 6:32:25 AM10/19/15

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> I would still reinstall all the drivers, starting with the Intel chipset, then reboot, then
all the rest (audio, Ethernet, video, wifi)
without an intervening reboot. Then a final
reboot.

Any reason? I mean it seems to be working okay.
I can do it if something seems to be broken later.

I'm surprised this worked. I guess it was just a
HD scribble, but so long as the drivers link in
right (I guess by name or registry or something?)
they'd not likely be scribbled too.

Aside:

Installing drivers always struck me as hit or miss
anyway. The Dell driver disk would check off
stuff that you don't have, and miss stuff that you
do have, so you sort of loaded things until it
worked after guessing. The online advice is
dumbed down to the point of uselessness, like this
utility makes the machine work better.

I only load from the drivers tab, not from the
mysterious utilities tab or anything, which tab
always seemed to get me in trouble.

Anyway it's unpleasant enough, in terms of not
knowing what actually is needed, that I avoid it
if things are working.

Ben Myers

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Oct 19, 2015, 9:07:33 PM10/19/15

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Well, look at the devices in Device Manager.

Start -> Control Panel -> System -> Hardware tab -> Device Manager

If any of the devices has either a yellow exclamation point or a red X next to it, device driver(s) need to be installed. And, if that is the case, install the Intel chipset driver before anything else, and reboot to finish installing drivers... Ben Myers

Ron Hardin

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Oct 19, 2015, 10:09:46 PM10/19/15

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Ben Myers wrote:
> Well, look at the devices in Device Manager.
>
> Start -> Control Panel -> System -> Hardware tab -> Device Manager
>
> If any of the devices has either a yellow exclamation point or a red X next to it, device driver(s) need to be installed. And, if that is the case, install th

Good tip, thanks. There are a couple for hardware I don't have so I'll ignore them.

I really only use the machine as a CPU server in the winter (free electricity since it
heats the house). So long as wifi and Cygwin work, it's good.