Major System Failure

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Corallis

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A friend recently had a major system failure, and he gave me his PC to fix it. I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but it seems likely that there was a power surge and the motherboard was fried. The system would not boot at all - when it was powered up, the power LEDs would come on, but that was it, there was no POST, and no video output to the monitor. I went ahead and replaced the motherboard, and now it will POST and display the motherboard splashscreen, but when it attempts to boot windows a message is displayed telling me that windows cannot boot because a major configuration file is missing. It then goes on to tell me to try to repair the installation by using the windows installation CD. Ok, so I attempted to boot from the Windows XP installation CD, but the CD-ROM keeps hanging during the hardware detection phase.

So, as it stands right now I've got a machine that cannot boot from the hard drive, and cannot boot well enough from the CD-Rom to fix the hard drive. Does anyone know what the problem might be? The system specs are as follows:


Biostar B8T890-A9 Motherboard
Athlon 64 3000+ Socket 939 CPU
2x 512MB OCZ PC3200 RAM
Western Digital 160GB HDD
Radeon x800 PCI-Express Video Card

Thanks for any advice.
 
You are probably going to have do a reformat/reinstall of windows. To get any data off of the hard drive, put it into a working computer as a slave and you should be able to recover any data on it (before the format, of course). You could also do what I did when I f'ed over my windows file a while ago, and just buy a new hard drive (or tell your friend to). :D Thats really the easiest option. It doesn't require any backup of data, which can be time consuming and take a lot of CD's or whatever you use. If you get a new hard drive, install windows on it, then assign it as the master (using jumpers) and put the old one in and assign it as a slave.
 
Hi, thanks for the reply. I think you missed something in my origional post though. I can't reinstall windows since I cannot boot from the CD. When it boots from the CD, it hangs at the hardware detection step and just sits there indefinitely. It happens every time I try to boot from the CD. If I was able to boot from the CD, I could probably fix the problem with the hard drive, but that is not possible right now. Does anyone know why this might be happening?
 
Try swapping out some of the important parts with a working system to try to determine what is at fault.
 
That would be the ideal situation. Unfortunately, I don't have a spare machine that is compatible with all of the parts. If I did, I wouldn't be here asking for suggestions ;)
 
Install windows with just the HD, CDrom, video card and memory. Leave all other peripherals off. If you get to the OS start adding stuff later on until the culprit or culprits show their faces!!
 
A good guide line to follow is when these things happen, and they do to everyone at some point, use only the essential parts. Mobo, cpu, memory, video card, power supply, then so itll boot into BIOS.

Then add the CD-Rom drive, then see if it boots. Then it does add the HDD, see if it boots, then so on and so on.


If you do think its the HDD, try using someone elses to see if that'll work.
 
read here its a driver issue http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=891892&SD=tech (and i cant believe im the only one who bothered to google it) , anyway i suggest youll use a partition manager like acronis disk director/paragon partition manager/partition magic and format the C partition or alternativly download and burn this program http://support.wdc.com/download/dlg/Diag504cCD.iso and write zeros to the drive (means it will erase it completly) eitherway when done just boot from the xp cd and it should go smooth , if theres data that you wanna backup before doing so then i suggest youll use ubcd4win or reatogo
http://www.ubcd4win.com/
http://www.reatogo.de/
(basicly it makes a live windows cd and there are various software plugins for it,burn the data to cd/dvd or copy it to another external/internal hard drive)

edit im not sure if i got that microsoft article right its kinda confusing , did you install an sata driver in the windows setup? if you did maybe its buggy or incompatible
 
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