A CPU that won't POST

[jatar_k]

hmmm, crashed yesterday afternoon and haven't had a chance to use it since then (have the laptop which works)

gets to the screen that says

windows experienced a problem
safe mode, with networking, normally

won't start in any mode, gets to the standard windows logo with the bar underneath and then just restarts.

tried booting from cd to repair and it says it can't find a hard drive, drive is spinning, not making any strange noises, could have failed.

it's a SATA drive and it had some trouble when it was built with detecting it so I wonder if it nuked the SCSI controller, might be an avenue to try.

any other ideas?

[bakedjake]

You try SpinRite on it yet?

[jatar_k]

didn't know that one

just lookin at it

[oddsod]

>> tried booting from cd to repair and it says it can't find a hard drive

XP? Are you loading SATA drivers during CD boot (otherwise XP could be looking only for PATA)? What mobo?

[jatar_k]

yep, XP home

it said it was loading sata drivers, good point, I guess it could still be looking for it the wrong way, not sure how to change that

mobo? not sure what that is

hehe, only a very limited knowledge hardware type

[benevolent001]

mobo i guess motherboard , are you sensing some virus?

If its working in safe mode , go to run types msconfig
disable all startup items and then try to reboot normally

lets see what it shows

oh read it now not working in any mode, do you have some other HDD to boot up?

[oddsod]

mobo=motherboard
SATA drivers - best ones to use are the ones on the floppy disk that came with the mobo. You lost them? You can make a copy from the mobo driver CD.

I try to disable all non essentials. Leave one optical drive for your Windoze CD and unplug the rest. Remove NIC, modem, soundcard. Unplug externals like printers, router.

Hit DEL, go into BIOS and make sure SATA is enabled (or the drive will spin but not even Linux will find it). If there is an option for SATA RAID you may want to disable it (unless you have a RAID setup).

Then try booting from your CD again.

[jatar_k]

I have a spare but there's nothing on it

moved twice recently and the lady of the house liked it better if I didn't have so many cpu's so I don't have them anymore, if I had them I would have more options

ah yes, mobo, got it now

asus a7n8x-e

[oddsod]

You can also download drivers from Asus' site (and elsewhere)

[jatar_k]

I have all the drivers, no probs there

[oddsod]

>>it had some trouble when it was built with detecting it
I'd concentrate on that. If you remember how you solved it then it's likely it's the same thing now.

Facts:
No funny sounds (so likely HDD not damaged
SATA HDD - So likely not being picked up by CD boot

Methinks that if you can get the repair running you'll be able to boot into safe mode to fiddle with startup programs/services etc.

[Birdman]

Try booting off a knoppix [knopper.net] cd. If it works, run dmesg on the command line. It may give you a hint.

[edited by: Birdman at 3:34 pm (utc) on Feb. 27, 2007]

[jatar_k]

it seems to be very difficult to do analytics with my wife following me around because she's worried and the barrage of 'how could it just stop' type questions

the daughter asking me constantly 'no works, no works'

I love them both but I decided to give up and take it to the shop (their 1 to 2 days may be quicker than me working with all these distractions ;))

disappointing

we'll see what they say and what I'll have to do from there

[jatar_k]

sweet, everything passed tests, hardware all works

windows on the other hand is nuked

guess I'll pick it up after my daughter's nap and go from there

[jatar_k]

I think I maxed the RAM which was what was happening when it crashed, guess that nuked win, how very delicate that beast is

was going to up to 2 GB soon, guess this is as a good a time as any

guess I should figure out how to keep whatever is on there, with moving I have been a little lax in my backups. Shouldn't be too big a deal

a nice clean install option like on a mac would be sweet, lose nothing but your prefs

[oddsod]

I'd do the backup in its current state. Just ghost the drive onto a spare. Just to be on the safe side. Glad your data is intact.

Good luck.

[jatar_k]

i need a floppy, just moved, don't know anyone with a cpu

have a laptop and 3 macs in the house, none of which have floppies so i can get the drivers on my cpu

this day gets better and better

[bill]

If your BIOS is set to boot off of the CD the you don't need a floppy. Birdman's suggestion above was a good one. There are special ISO images out there for Windows maintenance like the Ultimate Boot CD [ultimatebootcd.com] that include a lot of maintenance tools for just such an occasion.

However, if it's a drive issue then I've found bakedjake's suggestion to try out SpinRite a good one. It can take a while to run, but it's recovered a few drives for me.

[jatar_k]

if I can get the SATA drivers to load then I can run the repair, it could be that easy, not sure

if the repair doesn't work then I will go from there

it's easy enough if the repair works

[benevolent001]

jatar_k i think i have to vist your house for some coffee and fixing your PC

[jatar_k]

hehe, that would be fine

might be a bit far ;)

[benevolent001]

Nothing for far , for free coffee made by our Admin jatar i can go any where...

[jatar_k]

hehe

finally got the drivers, my Dad kept this old imation superdrive that I found this morning and hooked that into the old laptop and put my drivers on it

now I have to figure out how to work with the recovery console

My Dad is pretty elated that I used his old drive, validates his reason for keeping it ;)

[oddsod]

If your BIOS is set to boot off of the CD the you don't need a floppy.

My suggestion for the floppy drive wasn't so much for booting as to use the floppy drive for the SATA drivers. For SCSI and SATA HDD I've found that the best option.

[jatar_k]

that's exactly what I did oddsod, threw them on a floppy so I could F6 and install them so the win disk would see the drive, worked fine

chkdsk is running, found an error on the quick one and now running with /r we'll see how that goes, takes wuite a while, luckily the drive is only 120 GB

[jatar_k]

second chkdsk ran without errors

rebooted into safe mode, no probs

restarted and she is now all fired and looks like everything is fine

I have to check a bunch of stuff but looks good so far

thanks for all the insight

[benevolent001]

and coffeee? is it still offered ;)

[jatar_k]

of course, anytime :)