Dell Latitude E6420 laptop bricked after installing Solus Plasma

[deleted] If it's the same issue I've encountered, the bios halts before it gets to the phase of looking for bootable media.

I hope the issue is a screwed up HHD or BIOS, which CMOS replacement or Windows-created USB installation media might repair, rather than a MOBO problem. My guess -- and it is only a guess -- is that HHD issues are the probable cause, because (reading between the lines of the OP) the Solus Live session worked, installation raised no red flags, but the laptop would not boot after installation. Although with a computer that age, anything can go wrong at any time, it just seems unlikely that the MOBO would fail at right after installation. We've all seen strange things happen, though.

Question: You posted a picture of an E9420 boot screen. Do you have an E9420? If so, can the HDD be replaced with a modern SATA III SSD like this PNY vanilla SSD? If so, that might be the simplest thing to do, assuming that the HHD is FUBAR. I looked at the E9420 Service Manual and can't tell for sure whether SATA III is too new a standard for the computer.

tomscharbach I hope so too. That screen can indeed become at least sluggish with things like faulty HDDs or memory modules.

Answer: No, that's a pic from the internet to show what screen I (and I believe the OP) was talking about.

Speaking of the laptop I had, I tried everything imaginable (removing the CMOS battery, removing HDD, swapping memory modules etc) and it would still get stuck on the loading bar. After getting a replacement I didn't manage to brick it immediately, but after I needed a live USB for something and rebooted from the live environment I would be stuck on the screen again.

When I was passing the lappy (with a second replacement mobo) on, I made sure not to reboot from a live system and shut down instead. The brick didn't happen. Might be just a very bad coincidence or the BIOS getting corrupt, I don't really know. It's not a Solus thing, I used some other distro back then.

Rolts I just left the pc off for 16 hours without cmos, battery and ac, and it still gets stuck. Also formatted the drive. I guess i'll try the windows 10 method now, and yeah the laptop worked with like 5 other distros before.

I'm starting to think that @[deleted] is right, that the fact that the computer stopped booting between Solus installation and Solus first boot is coincidental, and the boot process is failing before the computer attempts to access drives. In that case, you've got a hardware issue, probably MOBO-related. Good luck with the Windows installation, but I'm not optimistic.

tomscharbach Sorry for confusing you with the E9420, I posted the pic just to illustrate the screen with the loading bar ^^

Axios

This seems to be a problem with dells I pulled up lots info on it but no real fix.

Yeah, if one searches for "Latitude E6* stuck on boot logo" there are plenty of unresolved results.

[deleted] Sorry for confusing you with the E9420 ...

Whoops. Brain dead, me.

For @Rolts, this is the Dell Support page for the E6420 and this is the E6420 Service Manual. The diagnostic lights are on pages 141-143.

In general, the two models (E6420 and E9420) seem very similar in terms of construction and servicing, although components are somewhat different. I checked the diagnostic light sections of the two manuals (E6420 and E9420) and they are identical between the two models.

You might want to check and see if you get any error codes from the lights. That might help you identify a hardware issue, if one exists.