Media Test Failure

[Guest]

The Pc will not boot up XP. It displays the following error mesage at a 3com
page: PXE-E61 Media Test Failure, check cables.
I have checked all the ribbon cables and changed the CDRom but still get the
same messge everytime. It is a Dell Desktop GX1 500L
Many Thanks in anticipation.

 

[Malke]

The Pc will not boot up XP. It displays the following error mesage at
a 3com page: PXE-E61 Media Test Failure, check cables.
I have checked all the ribbon cables and changed the CDRom but still
get the same messge everytime. It is a Dell Desktop GX1 500L
Many Thanks in anticipation.

Your computer is apparently set to boot from a network server that
doesn't exist. As the computer is starting up hit F2 to go into Setup.
Change the boot order to CD first, hard drive second.

Malke

 

[Guest]

The message may be telling you that the system is attempting to boot from the
network (known as a PXE or pixie boot). Try checking the bios for the boot
device sequence and disabling Lan boot, or PXE boot or anything other than
floppy, cd or hard drive boot devices. The items in the boot device list
will be tried one after another as the system tries to boot. If one device
doesn't boot the system, the next in the list will be tried.

 

[Guest]

Many Thanks, I tried that but it does nto make any difference, whatever the
boot order it always comes up with the same error. As it will not boot from
teh CDRom, it looks as if I willl have to remove the hard drive and reformat
it before reloading XP.

Thanks

 

[Malke]

Many Thanks, I tried that but it does nto make any difference,
whatever the boot order it always comes up with the same error. As it
will not boot from teh CDRom, it looks as if I willl have to remove
the hard drive and reformat it before reloading XP.

If you have the system boot order set correctly but it will not boot,
then it isn't finding any boot files on the cd (which makes sense
because you aren't trying to boot from cd) or the hard drive. This
usually means your hard drive has 1) died; 2) or the drive hasn't died
but the Windows boot files are missing; 3) the drive is OK but the
motherboard drive controller has died.

Usually if the drive is healthy and seen in the BIOS and the Windows
boot files are missing, you'll get an error saying something like
"NTLDR is missing" though.

Is the hard drive seen in the BIOS? Since you have a Dell, run the Dell
Diagnostics on the drive and the motherboard. If the drive is not seen
in the BIOS, you can try taking it out and putting it in another system
to test it. If the other system can't see the drive, then you know the
drive is faulty and not the motherboard connection in the original
machine.

If you don't have another computer and/or computer skills to do the work
yourself, take the machine to a professional computer repair shop for
diagnosis.

Malke

 

[paulmd]

The Pc will not boot up XP. It displays the following error mesage at a 3com
page: PXE-E61 Media Test Failure, check cables.
I have checked all the ribbon cables and changed the CDRom but still get the
same messge everytime. It is a Dell Desktop GX1 500L
Many Thanks in anticipation.

What's happening is you have a network bootable NIC and I would bet
money it's a 3c905c or 3c920 (same chip). But you have no bootabe
network.

If you have never booted from the network, and this is a new message it
means one of several things.

a) your BIOS got changed, and now it is attempting to boot the network
before the hard drive. The fix is to go into the bios and change the
boot order.

b) your hard drive died, or came unpulgged.

c) hard drive controller failure, of failure of the IDE ribbon cable.