PC will not recognise HDD at boot-up.

[Stuart Roberts]

Just the other day I left my computer on doing a virus check, etc. When I
went back to it, it had tried to re-boot and on the second DOS-style boot up
screen (just before it flips to the WinXP sequence) it said it could not
detect any kind of device to boot from.
I re-booted but the same. I went into the BIOS to select auto detect my
IDEs, etc. It would not auto detect either. I tried loading the fail safe
setting in BIOS but still the same.
I left the machine off for an hour or so and returned. It then booted up!
This morning the computer hung during a windows session. I gave my PC case a
gentle whack and for a second it un-hung itself before going to a big blue
screen telling me something about an unknown error and finished with a
memory dump comment. Nothing at all happened after that. Then I had the same
problem as before, until I left the machine for a while and went back to it.
I have noticed my system slowing down lately but it is only about half full.

Any ideas? Is it the hard drive failing? Mother board?

Thanks
Stu

 

[Keith]

Any ideas? Is it the hard drive failing? Mother board?

Don't thump your computer, WinXP has artificial intelligence and
when you abuse your computer it will refuse to run ;-)

Make yourself a boot diskette, boot the computer with the
floppy, type chkdsk at the prompt and then a boot up WinXP in safe
mode to perform a complete de fragmentation.
If you get a bad file make a note of the filename, if something
happened while your computer was running the anti-virus software it
could have damaged some files it was checking. If the file is a
component of installed program, uninstall and then reinstall the
program. If it is a document, database or necked girlz I hope you have
a back up.

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Best Regards,
Keith
http://kilowatt-radio.org/ NW Oregon Radio Page