Freeze, now no boot

[SXRguyinMA]

My boss was on his office computer last night checking his email when it froze. he just shut it off and went home.

came in this morning and turned it on, it got to the screen where you can select safe mode, etc. hit start windows normally and it froze.

rebooted it, pops up and says "Insert boot device" or something to that effect.

reboot again, comes back to the safe mode screen, but half is in jibberish.

reboot again, comes to the safe mode screen again, all is normal. hit boot in safe mode, the progress bar fills up, then it locks up again, HDD light is on solid.

reboot again, same sequence of issues. "no boot device" then jibberish, then normal, then locks up.

anyone have any ideas? I'm going to bring back one of my XP Pro CDs when I go home on lunch and try to repair windows and see if that works :think:

[billygoat333]

hdd starting to die? virus? can you go into the bios with no lockups?

[SXRguyinMA]

I didnt try the bios yet, will try that and let you know

:EDIT: I was able to get into the bios and play around with no lockup. I checked all the boot settings, everything seemed right, it detected the HDD in bios. exited and rebooted, same issues again :?

I'm thinking the HDD is on its way out, but I'll try booting from CD first and see what happens

[x88x]

I third(?) the motion for dying HDD.

[SXRguyinMA]

alright heres what we got

popped in the xp pro cd, boot order was set wrong, went into bios to set the boot order to floppy, cdrom, hdd, saved and exited.

pressed any key to boot from cd

popped up and said the usual "setup is inspecting your hardware" for 3 seconds then went blank. sat blank for a minute or so, then heard CD drive spin down. looked at HDD light, nothin goin on.

system info:

P4 1.8GHz 400MHz FSB
256MB DDR266
Intel D845GBV board
Xpert 2000 Pro Ultra 32M AGP
Maxtor 9408U8 HDD
CD Rom and Floppy

:EDIT: I'll see if I've got a spare HDD @ home I can pop in tomorrow to try, if it works fine then I'll know its that

[Luke122]

+another for dying hdd.

Anything on it that needs to be recovered?

[SXRguyinMA]

he said if it needs to be wiped and windows reinstalled then no big deal, so I'd assume no. A new 80GB IDE drive is only $40, but I'm going to try one I have tomorrow and see if it works before he goes and orders one

[SXRguyinMA]

ok, I'm 99% sure its the hard drive now. he had a spare 400GB ide drive layin around that he didnt know where it came from, so I popped that into a different computer to check it out...same thing (he thinks it may be a bad one that came out of the server, and now I'm thinking hes right).

I found an 80GB IDE on tiger for $40, we'll probably end up ordering that

[SXRguyinMA]

ordered up the 80GB and a 1GB stick of ram, should help over the 256MB it had lol

[SXRguyinMA]

alright got the HDD in today, same thing :think:

I took his old HDD home and plugged it into my secondary comp, boots up fine. Has me wondering if its a bad cable or mobo? I know its not memory, as I removed the 256MB stick that was in tehre and just put the 1GB stick in.

I'm going to bring back one of my spare IDE cables and see what happens

[Luke122]

Cable could be a cheap fix for sure. If it's happening with the new hdd also, try the other IDE channel too.

[SXRguyinMA]

I put in a different cable and plugged the hdd into the other IDE port on the mobo, booted into win 2k but something must have messed up the HDD because it wont let me login. I put in the new HDD and my XP Pro CD, and it does the same "setup is inspecting your computers hardware configuration" then just sits there with a blank screen. Maybe its the cd drive thats causing that issue. I'm going to put the new HDD in another computer here with a known good cd drive, and try it

[SXRguyinMA]

ok, I put it into a different known good computer, does the same thing with the new HDD :think:

maybe the new ones bad?

for giggles I plugged the old HDD into the same known good computer, getting the same starting windows loading bar, then once its full it freezes there. this is really annoying me now :?

I put the computer back how it should be (the known good one/test unit) and its all good again. could it be a combination of things all at once?