PC wont boot up?

Question

I've been trying to fix a dead pc belonging to a friend. It gets to the screen with all the data on it and a flashing cursor in the bottom corner. I've tried booting up to cd-rom but it wont do that neither, was gonna try reinstalling windows.... I've tried cd-rom in another oc, it worked, i've tried the ram in another pc, it worked, i've tried putting hard-drive in another pc it didnt work, windows is corrupt. So I'm reinstalling windows at the mo then will try transferring it into the dead pc, see what happens. Do you reckon this will work? If not, do you have any other ideas I could try? I'm getting desperate here...lol

Thanks in advance XX

Answer 1

Hi - if you have another PC with a spare IDE / SATA cable (depending on your hard drive) then attach the Hard drive (HDD) to the spare cable in the other machine - boot it up, this should start up and show the disk in my computer as a spare disk - right click on this, properties, tools tab then click check now, tick both boxes and allow it to do its thing (may require reboot before the scan begins) this should scan and fix any software issues on the drive. Alternatively this could mean a dead HDD which will require replacing. Hope this helps. If this doesnt work then put more info on here and i will try and help some more or post at computing.net forum - they are very good.

Answer 2

The flashing cursor means that the computer is not finding the boot file information so it can't get past that point in the boot process.

Are you sure that the Hard drive is OK. Go into the BIOS and make sure that the computer is seeing the drive. Put a new/different hard hard drive in the computer and try it.

While in the BIOS make sure that the boot order is CD ROM before the hard drive.

Depending on the computer and operating system it may be that a driver needs to be loaded to make the CD ROM work before loading windows. (Remember the old Windows 98/95 boot disk that came with Windows that put a CD ROM driver in the computer before loading the Windows setup program)

If Windows is corrupted it must be repaired or replaced, normally in the machine it will be used in. When Windows is loaded to a hard drive a lot a drivers and other set up files are also loaded along with other data specific to that computer so loading Windows on a Hard Drive from another machine probably won't work. You can TRY you have noting to lose. A hard drive can always be formatted again.

Answer 3

i might recommend attempting: a million) elevating the ambient temperature interior the room. 2) Checking the factors put in on line for minimum working temperatures and changing them with something greater physically powerful in case you come across a controversy. 3) attempting to maintain the humidity interior the room to a minimum. 4) Checking for any failing factors. 5) looking at counsel on the thank you to insulate the computing device if necessary (besides the actuality that not too plenty because it is going to nonetheless might desire to deplete an excellent style of warmth as quickly as is has have been given began).

Answer 4

get a new hard drive ,also clean the cd and cd player. sometimes scsi systems need to be booted from network ,wich i think is not your case.buy a new HD.

Answer 5

i would have made the friends harddrive a slave and run all my programs on it to see if it was corrupt viruses or bad sectors or what not if you i were able to access it iv done it before but it really depends on what happen to the drive ..