Comp won't boot

[Barb and Ray]

Dell Dimension 8400 computer working fine one day, the next, it won't
completely boot and freezes at blue screen asking for Windows XP Home
Premium Sp2 CD to be placed in CD drive.

We set boot sequence to CD drive first, the CD activation light comes on,
however, nothing happens; we press Enter and end up at the blue screen again
asking for the XP SP2 CD to be placed in CD drive.

We have tried this with the full version XP SP2 CD and with Dell's
Reinstallation CD.

Thanks for any help available.

 

[Malke]

Dell Dimension 8400 computer working fine one day, the next, it won't
completely boot and freezes at blue screen asking for Windows XP Home
Premium Sp2 CD to be placed in CD drive.

We set boot sequence to CD drive first, the CD activation light comes on,
however, nothing happens; we press Enter and end up at the blue screen
again asking for the XP SP2 CD to be placed in CD drive.

We have tried this with the full version XP SP2 CD and with Dell's
Reinstallation CD.

It sounds like your hard drive died. Is the drive seen in the BIOS? Time to
do some hardware testing.

http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/page2.html#Hardware_Tshoot

Testing hardware failures often involves swapping out suspected parts with
known-good parts. If you can't do the testing yourself and/or are
uncomfortable opening your computer, take the machine to a professional
computer repair shop (not your local equivalent of
BigComputerStore/GeekSquad).

Malke

 

[Patrick Keenan]

Dell Dimension 8400 computer working fine one day, the next, it won't
completely boot and freezes at blue screen asking for Windows XP Home
Premium Sp2 CD to be placed in CD drive.

We set boot sequence to CD drive first, the CD activation light comes on,
however, nothing happens; we press Enter and end up at the blue screen
again asking for the XP SP2 CD to be placed in CD drive.

We have tried this with the full version XP SP2 CD and with Dell's
Reinstallation CD.

Thanks for any help available.

In addition to Malke's advice, I would suggest that you remove the hard disk
and be sure it's backed up, by attaching it to another XP system and copying
the data off. Be sure you get the mail and address files.

If the hard disk is failing, as suggested, it has limited time and you need
to get the data off as soon as you can.

HTH
-pk