poertner_1274
Posts: 3,874 +3
I have a problem wiht a friend of mine's mom's PC. He brought it to me saying it won't boot. I took a look at it and it went through the post, but then just sat at a black screen.
I took the HDD out and put it into my computer as a slave, just to make sure the HDD wasn't dead. It worked, so I scanned it with Norton, and found 400 virii. It took care of them all, so I assumed this would fix the problem, as they were taking up all of the virtual memory for boot. But it didn't work, I put the HDD back and tried to boot, but got the same problem as before.
I should have looked at the exact components, but I forgot. I am at home now and the PC is at school, I plan on working on it again after break.
I am assuming that the graphics card is still okay because it displays the post.
It has 98se on it, I think.
My solution to him was that the boot loader is messed up, and that HDD is not bootable anymore. I suggested buying another cheap HDD from me or my roommate and putting an OS on that one, then transferring data from the old one to the new one. Then formatting the old one and using it as a backup.
I haven't personally checked yet, but I know it boots to a boot disk, but the owner informed me that it will not boot from a CD. I haven't tried this yet, as I had to go home for break. This kind of puts a damper on my boot loader problem, if it won't boot from CD though, because I won't be able to install a new OS anyway if I can't get it to boot from CD......
I will check this out when I get back, but I just wanted to post this little bit to see if anyone had any suggestions. Like I said I have done minimal work on it right now, and will post more detail once I have the PC back in my hands.
Thanks guys.
I took the HDD out and put it into my computer as a slave, just to make sure the HDD wasn't dead. It worked, so I scanned it with Norton, and found 400 virii. It took care of them all, so I assumed this would fix the problem, as they were taking up all of the virtual memory for boot. But it didn't work, I put the HDD back and tried to boot, but got the same problem as before.
I should have looked at the exact components, but I forgot. I am at home now and the PC is at school, I plan on working on it again after break.
I am assuming that the graphics card is still okay because it displays the post.
It has 98se on it, I think.
My solution to him was that the boot loader is messed up, and that HDD is not bootable anymore. I suggested buying another cheap HDD from me or my roommate and putting an OS on that one, then transferring data from the old one to the new one. Then formatting the old one and using it as a backup.
I haven't personally checked yet, but I know it boots to a boot disk, but the owner informed me that it will not boot from a CD. I haven't tried this yet, as I had to go home for break. This kind of puts a damper on my boot loader problem, if it won't boot from CD though, because I won't be able to install a new OS anyway if I can't get it to boot from CD......
I will check this out when I get back, but I just wanted to post this little bit to see if anyone had any suggestions. Like I said I have done minimal work on it right now, and will post more detail once I have the PC back in my hands.
Thanks guys.