PC Crashed, help needed

[mooeypoo]

Hi guys!

 

My roomate has an older computer I've assembled for her with everything on it (WinXP, Office, the works). It may not be the perfect computer, but it worked for a few weeks already quite well and smoothly.

 

Today, however, the computer seemed to crash, and I can't figure out what to do. It's loading the BIOS, and then - right after it - it states that "CD ROM BOOT FALURE". I don't know why it would even look in the CD rom, I set it up to boot from the HDD.

 

But I tried, regardless, to put WinXP bootable in the CD Rom, it reads it, and writes the same problem.

 

It won't load from the HDD either.. I tried to check the hardware cables, and everything seems to be okay...

 

any ideas?

 

~moo

[JesuBungle]

If it's an older computer, it's quite possible that the drive is faulty. If you have a spare CD-ROM drive sitting around, I would try swapping it in there.

[mooeypoo]

Why would it even look into the CD Rom though?? It should first load from the hard drive... it seems like the boot in the hard drive is faulty too, which makes things even worse... :\

 

I don't have another CDRom drive...

 

~moo

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Try removing the CD drive from the boot sequence to see what happens.

[YT2095]

when it does the BIOS thingy, key pressing F8, it`ll kick you into a new menu, select DOS.

then IIRC it`s something like: scanreg.exe/restore and then Enter

then you`ll be pressented with a list of dates, select the one when you KNOW it was working, and try that

 

it works for a Multitude of sins

[insane_alien]

i see 2 possibilites,

 

1. the hardrive is faulty so it looks for a boot sector from the CD drive but there is nothing in there.

2. the CD drive is faulty and cannot communicate properly with the mobo.

 

check all the connections(even if they seem counter intuitive)

if it still craps up then do the whole process of elimination.

replace CD drive

replace HDD

etc, etc, until it works. (only do 1 at a time and use ones from a computer you know works)

 

first you could try just removing the CD drive

[mooeypoo]

Okay I'm going to sound like a complete idiot..

 

My roomate just kicked the computer lightly (or so she said..), waited three minutes, and lit it again, and it works perfectly now.

 

...

 

how.. uhm.. yeah. no words, really.

 

 

Thanks for your help guys.. but appearantly the computer is just a masochist. And Sadist. Whatever. That was weird.

 

~moo

[Klaynos]

Okay I'm going to sound like a complete idiot..

 

My roomate just kicked the computer lightly (or so she said..), waited three minutes, and lit it again, and it works perfectly now.

 

...

 

how.. uhm.. yeah. no words, really.

 

 

Thanks for your help guys.. but appearantly the computer is just a masochist. And Sadist. Whatever. That was weird.

 

~moo

 

Faulty drive.

 

It'll give the error probably becasue CD is above HDD in the boot list so it checks there first, sees some crazy error and drops out. If it happens again try removing it from the boot list as suggested above, or try unplugging it, but this may give the same error.