Boot problems.

bluetrumpet01bluetrumpet01
edited September 2003 in Hardware
I just finished building my brother a comp the other day. Its been running fine. Then I get home yesterday, and he says it won't boot. I thought it was going to be a no-brainer, but then it get really weird...

The computer boots, and then the Windows thing comes up and it says "An error has occured during the last boot bla bla bla" and then it gives me the usual options "Safe Mode", "Safe Mode With Networking", etc. Anyways, whenever I picked ANY of them, the computer would just reboot immediately.

At this point I decided to whip out my trusty Win98 boot disk. It wouldn't load DOS...it'd just hang right before it loaded the command prompt.

Then I decided to get creative, I got my Win98 CD and tried booting off of that, It would still hang. So would the WinXP CD.

So I've come to the conclusion that the computer won't boot anything (duh!). What I'm wondering...what could be the culprit?? Usually I'd just troubleshoot cuz I have a few spare parts of the older stuff (PC100 RAM, etc.) The store I bought the parts from is closed today (Sunday), so I was wondering if you guys had any ideas. Personally...I think its the RAM, but I have no way of testing that out until Monday, and my brother is getting impatient.

Computer Details:
Motherboard: Shuttle AK32E
CPU: AMD Athlon 2400+
RAM: 1-stick of 512MB PC2100
Vid: Nvidia GeForce FX 5200
HD:
--Boot: 6 GB
--Storage: 120 GB

Comments

  • ClutchClutch North Carolina New
    edited September 2003
    Well it is kind of hard to trouble shoot parts until you actually get some parts to switch out with. I guess start with the obvious for now, make sure everything is plugged in, check the bios to see if everything seems to be detecting and temps are right.
  • AMD-FanAMD-Fan Virginia Beach
    edited September 2003
    Try memtest86 and see what happens.
  • bluetrumpet01bluetrumpet01
    edited September 2003
    Well...I tried memtest...but this was already after I went to the store (TigerDirect). The guy insisted it was a harddrive problem, I insisted he was an idiot. Unfortunately, I was wrong. I brought the rig home, ran memtest, everything checked out...then i noticed the big 120 GB HD was getting hot as f***. That explains why the small 6 GB I was using as the boot drive fizzed out. So tomorrow I get to go buy a hard drive cooler (after I reinstall the OS with an ice pack under the drive to make sure I have the right culprit this time). Wish me luck :D
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited September 2003
    Are you sure you have the floppy and CD-ROM set to boot Before the HD in the bios???
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