Power Failure: Cannot boot.

[Guest]

Hi. My mum turned the pc by the main switch and now it will not boot. It says
there was a power failure or hardware change. I have about 5 options, but
which ever one i choose the pc just restarts. I have recently installed a XP
Pro onto my drive but cannot access all my old Home things or repair it or
anything. I have a recovery cd but not an actually XP Home edition CD so i
dont know what to do, Any ideas?

 

[Maurice N ~ MVP]

A recovery CD will not allow a repair-install of XP.
Would you please list what 5 options you are seeing? And post back with
info on whether this pc has Service Pack 1 or Service Pack 2.
One of the things to try now is.... once the pc is booting up, start tapping
& repeat tapping the F8 Function key to get boot up options. Once you see
that, select Safe Mode with Command Prompt, and once in there run CHKDSK.

It is very possible all you need to do is get things cleared up thru CHKDSK.

 

[Ron Martell]

Hi. My mum turned the pc by the main switch and now it will not boot. It says
there was a power failure or hardware change. I have about 5 options, but
which ever one i choose the pc just restarts. I have recently installed a XP
Pro onto my drive but cannot access all my old Home things or repair it or
anything. I have a recovery cd but not an actually XP Home edition CD so i
dont know what to do, Any ideas?

Does one of the startup options say "disable automatic restart on
system failure" or words to that effect? If so then you should choose
that option.

That will most likely just produce a "Blue Screen Of Death" with a
STOP error message. If it does then the contents of the STOP message,
including all of the parameters, will be a direct clue as to the
underlying cause of the problem.

Hopefully when you installed XP Pro you did so in a different hard
drive partition from where XP Home was installed. If you did this
then when you boot into XP Pro the XP Home partition will also be
listed in "My Computer" with a drive letter assigned to it. If that
is the case then one thing you can try is to open a DOS window (Start
- Run - CMD) and enter the following command:

CHKDSK (letter assigned to XP Home partition) /R

Assuming that the XP Home partition shows up as drive D: when you boot
into XP Pro then the command would be:

CHKDSK D: /R

That may fix the problem, as the most common result of incidents such
as you described is that the hard drive data struture is damaged,
resulting in an STOP 0x000000ED (UMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME) error.

Good luck


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

In memory of a dear friend Alex Nichol MVP
http://aumha.org/alex.htm

 

[Guest]

No, there are in the same partion im sure. I just made a new folder in
Windows called Pro when i was installing. So i can get all my files or see
them at least, my Home edition is not listed in my computer. Tried that Check
dsk thing but with an F for fix on startup but it didnt help. About the
options they are
1.Safe Mode
2.Safe Mode with networking
3.Safe Mode with command Promt
4.Last known configuration
I think thats it. Whichever option i choose it just reboots. Safe Mode gets
to a certain Bus file then reboots but most just reboot when i press enter on
them. Ive got some of my games working now however. I installed a new one
which installed DirectX9.c i think and then they all worked?
Thanks