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Ok, so I have a Dell XPS that I bought around 2011.

About two weeks ago, it started behaving strangely during the boot load. First of all, it makes some weird clicking noises. When that happens, I know the computer won't boot at all.

It also displays this message:

Intel UNDI, PXE-2.1 (build 083)
Copyright (C) 1997-2000 Intel Corporation 
This product is covered by one or more of the following patents:
US5,307,459, US5,434,872, US5,732,094, US6,570,884, US6,115,776 and US6,327,625

After turning it on and off many times, it boots like nothing ever happened.

After booting successfully the first time this happened, I backed up all my data and made a fresh Ubuntu 14.04 install. At first, it looked like everything was back to normal, but after a few boots, it started behaving the same way again.

I also attempted to use boot-repair, but it didn't work.

Does anyone know what's going on? Thanks in advance.

mukade
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    A clicking sound? I think your hard drive is one the way out. – TheWanderer Aug 22 '15 at 17:42
  • This message indicates your laptop is trying to boot PXE(network boot). Better saying, it has not found any hd to boot up. Look at your BIOS settings if hd is out of boot order. It may be hardware issue. – Redbob Aug 21 '17 at 13:49

1 Answers1

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Boot-repair cannot help with a hardware problem. The message:

Intel UNDI, PXE-2.1 (build 083)...

means your computer was trying to boot from the network. It was probably doing this because no disks were bootable at that moment.

Combined with the clicking noises, which mean the disk was struggling to read something, this means your hard drive is failing. Though it might work after it has warmed up from multiple reboots, you cannot rely on this at all.

Ensure you have good backups now, and replace the drive!

Community
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Martin Thornton
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