PC won't boot up
 

Hi all

Just been around to my mums and her PC will not boot up.....

Get to the blue window load screen then goes to a black screen which

Master Drive *********
Slave Drive Nothing
Secondary master *********
Secondary slave ***********

Etc etc

All had details apart from Slave drive I think.....

Then get to bottom of screen and states something like

ACTPI load from CD-rom failure

And then goes back to the first window load screen

Tried safe mode and went through all the options but nothing worked.

I did find a CD installation disc for a wireless router in one of the drives but took that out and still would not boot up.

If would be great if someone had some ideas on a possible fix

Many thanks for your time

Regards

Mike

Re: PC won't boot up
 

The system is not finding a master boot disk.

The ACPI error message probably resulted from it trying to boot from the CD and not finding valid boot files on there.

First thing I would do is check the cable connections to the hard disk. Pull and re-connect the data and power cables. Also try listening to the hard disk or putting a finger on the top to try and tell if it is spinning up.

Re: PC won't boot up
 

If he's managed to try Safe Mode then he's getting it to boot from the hard disk but windows is refusing to load. The CD boot message is probably just a standard one it display on POST when no bootable CD is in the drive because the BIOS is set to check the optical drive first.

If you have tried Safe Mode do you get a Blue Screen Of Death or does it just flick on the screen and then reboot? Things to try would be a memory test using memtest (www.ultimatebootcd.com) and a chkdsk /r from booting off the windows disk and going into rescue mode.

If this doesn't work and the machine doesn't endless reboot but hald on a BSOD then let us know what the error says.

Re: PC won't boot up
 

My mistake.. I looked at the rows of asterisks and misunderstood. Thought he meant that no data was showing.

Forget I was here.. Move along now, nothing to see..

Re: PC won't boot up
 

He does not say he gets into safe mode he says he has tried all the options.

The fail to load from cd rom simply means there is not a disc in the drive its meaningless. As it appears he is getting the option of safe mode the disc is seem its just corrupt so my advice is a repair install

There is a complicated way of running a system restore from recovery console if you fancy a challenge

http://searchwindowsserver.techtarge...167895,00.html#

Re: PC won't boot up
 

Never said he was getting into safe mode, I said 'If he's managed to try Safe Mode..'. As well as the link Zing suggested you could try building a Ultimate Boot CD 4 Win (modified bartPe boot cd), which boots into an XP environment straight from a CD (much like Linux 'Live' CDs) and has a restore program on it which can use the windows restore points to try and get the machine up and running. It also has loads of other stuff to try and diagnose problems.

Re: PC won't boot up
 

And I never said you did ;)

Re: PC won't boot up
 

Just to confirm I get to then screen which offers safe mode, last know good configuration, etc etc but which ever option I chose it just goes back to the load windows screen and then CR rom failure as mentioned in my first post.

Problem is the PC is old and mum has not got any of the original discs such as windows etc.

Any more ideas gratefully received.

Many thanks

Mike

Re: PC won't boot up
 

I would suggest getting SeaTools for DOS and test the master HDD. http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/sup...ls/seatooldreg
either Floppy or CD-rom image available

Re: PC won't boot up
 

Just an 'off the wall' thought, as the CD drive keeps cropping up.

I'm thinking perhaps that drive is borked in some way.
Try disconnecting this drive and trying boot again.

It's a long shot but it shouldn't keep giving any error message.