WinXP Pro won't load at all, and after forced restart BIOS won't see HD.

[m.wanstall]

Hi all, this problem could be caused by any number of issues and I'm
getting a little frantic here so I'll list my whole morbid story from
the top, sorry in advance for the whole speal.

I got a new 200gb Seagate HD about a year back and hadn't needed it
installed until I was setting this box up as a testing box, and I had
noticed that the HD had a little rattle in it straight after I bought
it but I tested it as soon as I got home and it had worked fine.

About 2 months ago I installed Win XP Pro and then installed SUSE 10.0
using GRUB to handle my boot stuff. All has gone fine since then, both
OSes running smoothly until yesterday! When trying to run a newly d/led
copy of Zsnes Win version (yes I know, I wasn't "testing" anything,
just goofing off) I got the first Blue Screen of Death I've had since
installing the OS (unfortunately I didn't pay much attention to it, it
was some sort of kernel error, and I just rebooted). I tried the same
procedure again to see if it was the Zsnes exe causing this, and it did
the same thing. So I deleted the prog, got the dos version of it, and
went on my merry way. Next thing I did was download Limewire (okay, so
I wasn't in a working mood ) and upon installing it it hung and I got
another BSoD...again, I rebooted and tried reinstalling and the same
issue, so I gave up with that too and by now I'm starting to think
something could be fishy.

Now, in the meantime my power supply's fan's motor had been sounding
like it was dying for some time and then I started to get these
mysterious reboots for no reason or no prompt (but once I thought I saw
a quick flash of a BSoD before the restart) and then finally the power
supply wouldn't turn on anymore, it just died.

So I dive into the computer, pull out the power supply, go and invest
in a new one, found my graphics card was getting really hot so I moved
the sound card that was wedged up against it's fan down a slot. After
ALL of this was done I started my comp up and success, it actually
started! BUT then I first try to log in to my WinXP boot and I get the
loading screen, then I wait for about 30 seconds and I get a quick
flash of the BSoD and then it reboots. NOW, the strange quirk is after
this reboot my BIOS won't even detect my HD, it just hangs at the
"detecting IDE drives" and then eventually skips to "Insert system
disk" stuff and it won't detect the disk until I switch the comp off
and on again, then it does the same thing, detects it once, reboots and
then nothing. So then I reboot the comp and try a few more times, still
nothing. Then I finally decide to login to SUSE so I can go in search
of answers on Google, and what?!?! Now Grub won't even load. It's
detecting the drive at BIOS and then going to the "Insert system
disk"...so I reached for the SUSE install DVD and booted up the
recovery console, then had no clue what to do, so I tried the WinXP
Recovery Console. Tried FIXMBR, it did nothing, didn't even say it
needed fixing or anything. Tried FIXBOOT, it said it can't do it. Tried
changing directories to see if I could directly open my boot.ini, I
can't, CD won't change to anything but C:\WINDOWS.

So now I am thoroughly all out of ideas. I need the stuff that's on
this HD so I can't just format it. Is there ANY hope for me?!?!

Thanks for your help in advance and sorry for the lengthy post!! Cheers!

 

[Malke]

Hi all, this problem could be caused by any number of issues and I'm
getting a little frantic here so I'll list my whole morbid story from
the top, sorry in advance for the whole speal.

(snip)

You got good answers (one of them from me) when you posted this in the
SUSE newsgroup. The answer isn't any different here; this is not a
software problem. Since you already tried a different psu, you know it
is another issue - possibly motherboard and/or memory. See your post in
the SUSE group for more details.

Malke