system froze, now windows wont start up

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cheda212

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While I was playing Battlefield 2, suddenly the game froze on me,
The HD light stayed on. I decided to reboot it.
It goes through the POST screen and then it gives me this message:
Reboot and select a proper boot device, or insert media into boot device and reboot. (can't remember the exact words)

I was thinking it could possibly be the hard drive. I've tried selecting it to start up with the dvd drive with a xp pro cd in there
but no luck. It gave me the same message, tried clearing CMOS, that didnt help either. My friend suggested pulling out the power plugs to the HD, DVD, and pull out the video card, that didnt work either. So I'm stumped. Has anyone come across this problem before? I would hate to lose all my data on the HD.

btw its a k8n-e, with 2x 512, ati 9700 all in wonder, WD 160GB (about 2 years old), and a sony dvd writer.
everything was purchased from newegg
 
yea i forgot to mention that i've already tried that..
thanks for commenting

I guess I should add that the hard drive seems to work when I put my fingers on it. It seems as if it was stuck on a task and now its trying to resume that task. I could be wrong.

Is there any other way to get back into windows?

Someone said you could throw the hd in the freezer? I'm kinda sketchy about that, I will use that as my last resort if need be.
 
Have you tried hitting f8 upon boot to go into safe mode or setting your computer to last known good configuration, That is considering the drive isn't bad. If the drive isn't to toasted you can also try a bootable CD ROM like knoppix a free program or superwinPE don't know if SuperwinPE is a free program or a pirated copy but you can boot from superwinPE and the operating system in on the disk. So if you use one CD ROM to run the superwinPE and a burner to copy files you need to save superwinPE comes with nero built in.
 
Thanks for the input.

I actually ordered another hard drive.
I will still give it a try to see if I can still revive the old hard drive
with the Knoppix or SuperwinPE.
 
update:

Well I got my new hard drive today and hooked it up, still no luck.
I've even pulled out the cd drive from my old computer (good drive) and hooked it up, booted it with the xp pro cd and still the same message:
"Reboot and select proper drive or insert boot media and reboot"

Have tried to get into safe mode when I hit F8, I only get a list of drives and after I have selected either drive it goes back to the same message. I doubt the Knoppix or SuperwinPE would work since the XP wouldn't even boot. Right now the only thing I can think of is the motherboard being the culprit.

I will update this when I get this problem fixed...hopefully.
Also want to add, if I do get a new motherboard that means I would have to format my old hard drive in order for it to work with the new motherboard correct? Is it possible to keep the old data without formatting the hard drive?

Any comments are appreciated.
 
final update:

Well, I finally got it to work after two days of diagnosing, my good friend took out his motherboard, PSU, DVD drive, video card and cd's from his computer and we were able to confirm indeed it was a corrupted hard drive and a bad copy of xp pro (sigh).

Now in the process of recovering data and re-installing everything. Seems like getting the old stuff back from the bad drive is pretty much lost. Kinda sad about that but hey what are you gonna do?

ps. thanks for those who helped. Knoppix was a really nice program to work with though had some trouble with the german (even with english set as language)
 
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