Can't boot, please help

[karsten]

accidentally posted this first in the BSOD area:

Hi all, here's my problem,

power accidentally got cut to my pc and now it won't boot. I get the "windows not successfully starting" black page loop, then if I try to boot to my reinstall disk it says there's no hard drive even though BIOS recognizes it and the diagnostic utility says it passes. Not really sure what to do and don't have another machine handy to download/burn other possible fixes.

At first the issue was the floppy not found message but I reset the boot sequence and that was fixed. It also sometimes says that the system power is low. Did the hard drive get fried? please help!

thanks

btw

dell dimesion 8400 about 5 yrs old, but with some newer components
hard drive is a few months old
intel pentium 4

 

[swker98]

when windows starts will it boot into safe mode or last good config?

 

[karsten]

it wont boot to any of the standard options

 

[mailpup]

It might be the hard drive. You could substitute a known good one and see if you can install Windows on it. If that fails, then I would suspect the motherboard.

Power failures or similar events like yours can damage various different parts but when this happened to a friend of mine, we ended up replacing the motherboard.

 

[karsten]

I have a WD My Book Essential external hard drive that I backed up my files to. Is there a way that I can boot to that. I couldn't find a way to do it in BIOS. The best I got was it booted to a blank black screen with a cursor that I couldn't type anything to.

 

[mailpup]

If the BIOS will not allow booting to an external drive, you can't do it. Besides, you can't just boot to any hard drive just because it's a hard drive. You have to make it bootable by installing an operating system on it.