New
#41
Just a thought - wondering if the hard drive has died? You said you have one computer running Ubuntu, so you are familiar with that. Do you have a disk of Ubuntu? You could pop that in the DVD drive of the 1545 and set the BIOS to boot from the optical drive, and see if you can run the "live" version. If you can, once you get to the Ubuntu desktop, it will immediately tell you if the hard drive has failed.
You said you were able to run Dell diagnostics through F12 - were you able to run hard drive health, and did it check out okay?