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Original Title: What is this delay in starting Windows 8????
When I turn on my laptop, instead of immediately going to the start page of windows 8, my screen is black with the Dell logo, and a message to the left that says 'Start PXE over IPv4'. after a good while it then says 'FXE-E18 Server Response Timeout'. then after another while, it says 'Start PXE over IPv6'. then after another minute or more wait it says, 'FXE-E16 no offer received', and the little spinning balls start spinning and the start page finally shows up? What is this delay in 'connection (it's probably a good 3 minutes, maybe more)? What does this mean?
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Thank you for your kind words, although I think a few on here might disagree with you. Sometimes a simple 2 or 3 sentence answer is more useful than links, screen grabs and pages of information.
Having made the hard disk the 1st boot device if you ever need to boot from DVD just press the F12 key and you get a one time boot device selector, far easier than changing things in the BIOS.
Please mark your choice as an answer to move this thread to Answered
Then it is definitely the F2 key.
When 1st switched on after a short pause with a blank screen my L702X of a similar age shows a Dell logo with Setup F2 and Boot Menu F12 in the right lower corner. There is less than a second before this goes so start tapping quickly the F2 key on its own before the Dell logo even shows to catch the entry point as the time available is astonishingly short.
PXE stands for Preboot eXecution Environment and is a special very minimal operating system held in the network card. Your operating system is on your hard disk and you normally boot from that, servers have hard disk which can be connected to over a network so why can't computers boot from a network hard drive? PXE means they can. It asks the network if there is a server which has an operating system it can use and if there is it will load it instead of using the local hard disk.
Network administrators would use this system to load computers with a blank or faulty operating system using a disk image stored on the server as you then don't have to have bootable USB drives or DVDs. I even worked on one site many years ago where the computers had no hard disks as they booted Windows in its entirety from the servers.
Thanks for your help. Some of your comments are far beyond my knowledge on this matter, but yes, I'm not getting to the BIOS load. I have no idea on the order, because cannot access any menu.
My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 17R SE 7720 I bought for last X-mas. I guess I should take it to some technician. Any idea on how serious this could be?
The you are not getting to the BIOS load as this normally says simply entering setup or similar.
What make and approx. age of laptop do you have? PXE over IP is very specifically a BIOS function as it is loading an operating system from a network source instead of from the usual local hard disk, optical disk or USB drive
What is particularly important is the boot order in relation to the normal operating system boot.
If before the OS then PXE should run for a while and then time out and pass control to the next device in the list. It then becomes little more than an annoyance as it can slow the boot down. If it starts to run then a TFTP server has been identified by DHCP on your network.
If after the main OS device (the HDD) it should never occur as the OS claims the boot and runs as normal. If PXE does run then the normal boot device has failed.
Thanks for your help you both. Yes, I tried hitting the F2 key immediately and continuously. And also with F12. But the only thing I get is a bar as if sthg was being loaded (but not increasing, normally it's empty. Sometimes it doesn´t even appear) and the message F12 Boot Options in the lower right corner. But of course, nothing happens when I press F12.
Any ideas? Thanks again.
