Help-Computer Surge, wont boot

[bethnielsen]

Need some help here, and I am not great at tech stuff. Thurs we had some sort of power surge at the house- we do have surge protector - and when the power came back on only one computer ( this one ) would work. The other 'important' one wont boot.
Both were plugged into same area with surge protector. The one that wont work runs on XP and is an HP Intel Celereon 2.0 processor. When I go to boot up all the comes on the screen is " A disc drive error , press ctrl alt del' When I press control alt del, nothing happens, just a blank screen for hours. It does appear that my daughters floppy was left in the A drive at the time of the surge- I have now removed the disc.
I asked my husband about maybe reinstalling the XP disc and he said that since this was a floor model HP we didnt get the disc with it it was already factory installed.
Of course there was no back up drive and I need to get my work stuff out , any ideas?
beth

 

[Ididmyc600]

Hi Beth and welcome to the TS forum :wave:

It would appear that the BIOS has lost site of the hard drive that holds the operating system, this can happen if the battery on the motherboard is dead and the power is removed for a period of time, I assume that the PC even when switched off is left plugged into a mains supply and as such you wont realise it, a good sign is that the time and date are wrong.

To remedy this.

Turn on the PC, if you are presented with what is called a splash screen ( a logo of the manufacturer) then press the ESC key, if you get a black screen with white writing then look for

"Press F2 or Del" or similar to enter Setup/BIOS

Once in the BIOS look around for something called first boot device, it should be set to HD0 or HD1.

If you cant find it look for anything related to hard drive or IDE device, the idea is to get the computer to look for the HD that the OS is on.

It is a possibility that the HD has failed due to the power loss, if this is the case then you will need to either contact the supplier if its in warranty or take it to a local PC shop for further investigation.

If however you manage to get the BIOS to see the HD and are able to set it to boot, then check the date and time, if its wrong chances are as i said the battery on the board is dead and will need to be replaced, this is as simple as changing a battery in a watch and uses the same type of battery,

It requires you to remove the case from the PC and locate the battery, once found just replace it with a new one.

Regards