Computer wont start | |
| There are a lot of reasons why a computer will not start and also when a customer rings to say a computer
will not start this can mean a lot of things. I had a computer recently that wouldn't start. In this case
the computer would boot through bios and start to load windows XP and then reboot again. The computer was a Pentium 4 512Mb computer with
a Gigabyte motherboard.
When you get rebooting like this the first thing to try is to see if the computer is showing the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).
You wont usually see this on boot up because the default setting for
windows XP is to restart immediately. So the first thing to do is to press F8 when the computer has finished the BIOS POST and about to start the windows boot. A menu will come up with an option to stop on error. Choose this and you will then get a stop error with an error code of the type 0x0000000A and googling the error will give indication of why the machine is failing. However, in this case there was no BSOD so I started to suspect the motherboard. Unfortunately, you cannot directly test the motherboard and must go with a process of elimination. This is difficult for a home DIY but if they have a working computer you can swap parts. The first thing I tried was to remove all of the PCI cards, no luck. I then used my power supply tester and tried a new power supply. The third thing I tried was replacing the memory and trying a single memory card in one of the slots. At the same time I removed the hard-drive took an image of it (you can never be too careful) and then did a check disk on the hard drive. The check disk found a couple of errors but the drive seemed stable. Eliminating everything I could think of left me to think that it was the motherboard. Now I can still get the 478 pin motherboards (ASUS) for the P4 CPU but after talking with the customer they decided that they would rather upgrade to a newer 775 pin motherboard, CPU and DDR2 memory. I replaced the motherboard with a Gigabyte 945GCM-S2L motherboard and an Intel E2180 Core 2 Duo chip. The only problem was that the had two DVD drives and there was only one PATA port on the motherboard. I threw in a new SATA drive and made their old PATA hard drive into an external storage for them. This was the easy part. When you change the motherboard XP has a heart attack. More specifically it fails with the stop error 7B. I'm not sure whether this is an anti piracy measure or a real problem with waking up with a new motherboard. Now it is time to put in the original XP disk and boot the computer to the CD player (You may need to change the boot order on the disk). Let the computer run and go through the initial device load. Select Install Windows rather than 'R' for repair. You will then be asked which partition do you want XP installed on. Select the original partition. Now you will be asked whether you want to install windows over the original install or Repair this installation. Select 'R' for repair. XP will go through the normal Setup process. XP will need to be reactivated and as you wont have the network drivers setup you will need to do this over the phone. This works most times but occasionally you will need to talk to a human. If you have office products you will probably need to reactivate those as well. The penultimate step is to reinstall the drivers. If you haven't save the driver utilities disk you will need to download them, which is a problem if your NIC is one of the missing drivers. If you can connect to the internet, you can go to you computer manufacturers site for the drivers or use a handy online system such as driver agent. The final step is to put back the 90 odd windows updates. To kick it off, open up internet explorer and go to tools->windows update and basically follow the prompts. Sometimes this goes awry and the updates will not load. The best tool for this is dial a fix. If this is all too much then you could just get a technician to do it for you... | |
 If you need a professional computer repair technician in the Shoalhaven or computer support Australia Wide | |
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