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| Thread ID: 77043 | 2007-02-25 02:36:00 | PC won't complete boot - just re-boots | John H (8) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 527935 | 2007-02-26 00:29:00 | Vell now, wery interesting (to me anyway...). First, I tried what M___ER suggested. All seemed to go well, through the first three steps, but after all that it still would not reboot properly. Went to your fourth step and tried to repair the windows installation, but it still refuses to accept my genuine XP Pro disk. When I tried, it said it was an upgrade disk and it couldn't find a previous Windows installation, so please insert the disk for the original installation. Duh. Been there before. So, good try, but no cigar. Thanks anyway. I then took out both drives, and tried them one at a time in a USP external drive casing plugged into the Shuttle family comp. First hard drive (the boot drive) works fine, and I was able to salvage all my data. Both partitions opened fine, so I have got all my emails/contacts etc on to the Shuttle, and My Documents updated (there was only one document that hadn't been backed up to the Shuttle over the wireless network - happens every day automatically, but I had shut down the office computer before sync time). So that is the main thing I was worried about - all data is now saved. The second hard drive was a different story. That one is an older drive, and it has two partitions. One partition is another backup destination for My Documents (yes, I wear a belt and braces :rolleyes: ); the other is an Archive partition where I store all my downloaded applications and updates. The Archive partition is fine, so I can copy that over to the Shuttle until the office PC is sorted out. However, the Backup partition is unreadable - it has a corrupted file system according to the Shuttle. I am sure that the latter problem is not the reason why the PC won't boot. So, I haven't solved the boot problem but I have saved my data. I will run the Seagate tool over these drives (both are Seagates) and see what happens. Thanks again for bearing with me, all of you who have helped. BTW Murray, I seem to recall that Xandros automatically mounts all partitions, and I couldn't find any utility that would do that in Ubuntu. I can see the Windows partitions in a number of ways (three at least) in Ubuntu, but cannot find any way of mounting them. However, not needed now, as that was only a way of saving my data and I have done that through the external hard drive option. Once I get things going again, I will sort out the Ubuntu thing. Thanks. John |
John H (8) | ||
| 527936 | 2007-02-26 02:18:00 | Have you tried booting without your second drive (the one with the corrupted partition) plugged in? It could be that. It sounds a lot like boot sector corruption. | trig42 (11325) | ||
| 527937 | 2007-02-26 02:32:00 | Thanks trig42 - I was going to try that when I reassembled the thing, but I forgot that part of my plan . Duh! :mad: When it didn't boot again, and still wouldn't recognise the existing Windows installation, I gave up before I hurt it irreparably, and took it into my local PC tech . :badpc: |
John H (8) | ||
| 527938 | 2007-02-26 03:03:00 | I had this happen to me once quite some time ago and I am affraid I have forgotten exactly what the cause but two things come to mind that did happen which may have been the cause. Battery for CMOS is close to failing and some settings are scrambled. When my battery failed I replaced it with a brand new one and the issues I had with it went away. The second one was a faulty stick of memory. To work this out I pulled both out and saw what happened, then put one back in, and then the other till I worked out which one was faulty and got a new stick. Again this fixed the problem. Third one was a faulty motherboard that would reboot by itself randomly but in the end failed to boot at all. New Motherboard fixed that one. However as I said I can't remember if these were related to the DMI problem or not as it was so long ago. |
Big John (551) | ||
| 527939 | 2007-03-12 08:03:00 | Sorry for the long delay, but I thought I would tell you the outcome . The problem settled down to I/O errors, and it was the back up drive that was at fault . There seems to be some kind of intermittent fault with it that stuffs everything . I was getting ready to bin it, but I first stuck it into an external USB hard drive case to save the data off it, and then put a new drive into the housing, formatted it, and copied the data onto the new drive . I then used this external set up to save an image of my family computer's hard drive . Somewhere right about then, I had lunch, did a few other things, and must have gone into brain fade, because instead of putting the new back up drive into the PC, I put the faulty one back . Sigh . Rebooted the PC, and chaos again . :badpc: It took some time and some tech help before my error was picked up . The new drive replaced the faulty one, and there have been no problems since, so I think the situation is at least temporarily back to normal . Thank you to those of you who tried to help me, and now you realise what a futile task you took on with that level of incompetence on the other end of the 'net . . . :lol: |
John H (8) | ||
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