Fried comp!

[Durftard]

a new nights ago, my friend ran his computer pretty late into the night, and when he woke up, his computer would no longer boot!

the mobo light was on, the harddrive light stayed lit the entire time and his fans would spin up. he couldn't, however, hear his harddrives spinning, and his northbridge on his mobo got dangerously hot immediately. nothing would appear on his screen.

we decided to try a different mobo, so we drove around town to different stores where they had NO socket 478 mobos in stock. my other friend ended up lending us his gigabyte GA 8I915P mobo, and an LGA775 Pentium 4 (3.0 ghz).

we plugged everything into the new mobo, and got a POST error - the video card was dead. we replaced it (RADEON X700PRO) with an extra one he had laying around (GeForce FX 5200). the computer would then boot up, but we continually got an error about a bad boot device. we plugged his harddrives into another computer, where it said his harddrives were unformatted. we reformatted them, and got the same error. so we started working with a *new* (right out of the box) harddrive. we formatted it (NTFS) and plugged it in

we inserted his windows XP CD (oem) and got the error "NTLDR is missing, press ctrl alt del to reboot"

the XP CD, however, works in other computers

we put a working cd-drive (with a working cable) into his computer, and get the same NTLDR error

**by the way, boot order was changed to make the cd-drive boot first



any ideas? i tried googling the error and it's all .. corrupt boot sectors for windows (already installed), etc.

this harddrive is freshly formatted, and we're no longer using any of the pieces from his old comp (it all fried except the PSU, RAM, and CD-drive .. from what we can tell)




just saw this thread ~ http://www.techist.com/forums/f77/ntldr-missing-148364/

same error, same deal

can't get to the windows setup blue screen, it locks up before we get there

 

[Brinson]

The very first thing you should have done is removed the memory, video, hard drives, ect, and seen if the system would post.

I had a problem alot like that a couple years back and it was a dead hard drive. I put that HD into my new pc once I built it and, heh, it wouldn't even post. Not sure how...but I had messed up an HD so bad it prevented the motherboard from posting. It makes no sense according to my knowlede of PCs, but it happened.

 

[Durftard]

The very first thing you should have done is removed the memory, video, hard drives, ect, and seen if the system would post.

I had a problem alot like that a couple years back and it was a dead hard drive. I put that HD into my new pc once I built it and, heh, it wouldn't even post. Not sure how...but I had messed up an HD so bad it prevented the motherboard from posting. It makes no sense according to my knowlede of PCs, but it happened.

With the new MOBO, it would POST and give a video error - so we switched the video card and that stopped happening. POST now runs successfully.

Right now, it'll start device detection, and right after it detects PCI devices, it gives the NTLDR error. Windows is not installed, and has never been installed, on this harddrive. It's brand new from the store.