NZFF

Today the computer froze me so i had to reboot. 5 mins later it did it again so i rebooted again but this time(and ever since) I get a message saying "insert boot media and reboot. Or insert boot media and press a key" So i put in my windows xp installation disks and chose recovery. After 2.5 hours of "examining the disk" i decided it froze/wasn't doing anything. Help!!! The computer was fine before this morning and i didn't download or change anything. I have reset BIOS and have changed the boot sequence with no such luck
Thanks in advance
James

Hmmm. Can you please clarify what it did to cause you to reboot

Sorry about that. The computer froze on me.

Try taking out a bit of RAM one piece at a time and restart etc.. this is just a guess and to elimate it from the long list of problems it could be ,,RAM sometimes causes these type of reboot errors if somehow it fails ...
just one at a time to find out if infact it could be that trial and error till you get this sorted ....
mike

Its not the ram.

can you get into the recovery console in the windows xp setup disk at all?

The disk loads but when i tried to enter the recovery console it "examined disk" for 2.5 hours. I suspect it froze. Is it meant to take that long?

You can try reseting the disk cable, or if you have SATA, try moving the disk to another port, but it feels like a dead disk (or disk controller which would be embeded on the MB) - a likely reason recovery is loading for so long could be due to bad sectors on the disk (or data corrupted by the controller ot bad cable) leading to retries, and retries, and retries....

Ran

I don't fully understand that so what do you suggest I do?
O btw I have checked the cables and BIOS is seeing that there is a hard drive.

If you have a SATA disk, connected with a narrow (usually red) cable, you may have more than one SATA port on the motherboard. Try moving the disk cable to one of the other ports.

if you have an IDE disk, connected using a flat ribbon cable, than you can try:
1. a different cable
2. disconnect any other IDE devices on that cable such as your CD/DVD drive, so that your disk is the only IDE device. Also, disconnect any disks etc on the seconday IDE port. < Make sure the drive select jumper on the disk is configured as Master >

If option 2 works, you may have a problem with the master/slave configuration between the devices.

I hope this helps.

Ran


PS. Just as a troubleshooting excercise, try connecting in a different hard drive (if you have one that is) and see if your system behaves differently.

hmmm, it doesnt seem likely a master slave problem would just appear by itself. You could try going down to your local store and buy a cheap old 5gig hdd to instal windows on, then check out your other disk from there.

It would appear that, as suggested, your harddrive is dead/dying or the drive controller (ie. mobo) is on the fritz...

You really need another drive (or a second computer) to determine which it is... if you try a 2nd drive and it works OK, then your drive is fubar... if you try another drive and get the same result, then faulty and/or loose cable or mobo is dying

We might be able to try out the hard drive on this computer but this one is IDE, and my one is SATA2, will that make a difference?

I have a Creative Zen Vision m which can be used as an external storage device. Can I load windows onto that and then check my internal hard drive from that?

please have a read
http://www.google.co.nz/search?hl=en&q...earch&meta=

Sorry, I dont have much time- (lunch time during working on the farm)

Great news!!! It is now fixed. The problem was an invalid boot code or something like that. Dad "stepped in" when we were down and out, he loaded the recovery console(waited 2-3 hours to load) then typed in one code and away we go!!! Thanks for the help guys.
James
P.S. I decided to buy a second usb pen to be used as a backup boot device should this happen again

ahhh yes, the recovery console saves the day I dont know how many times its saved my arse.

All you need to know is how to use it

brownbox wrote:

QUOTE(brownbox @ Oct 1 2007, 09:44 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

All you need to know is how to use it

And patients!!

ooOO00OOoo wrote:

QUOTE(ooOO00OOoo @ Oct 1 2007, 09:22 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

And patients!!

That's only needed for the hospital version of Windows .....