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Message
boot sector possibly messed up?
Posted on 6/16/14 at 1:11 pm
Posted on 6/16/14 at 1:11 pm
Have a dell pc that is used for home theater purposes. Came home this morning and it won't boot from the hard drive.
Powers on, goes through the Dell screen, stays running for about 30 seconds then just turns the entire system off by itself. Doesn't try to reboot over and over.
I reformatted the hard drive abiut 3 months ago. Have an authentic Windows CD, never registered it, worth trying to boot from that disk and reinstall or better just to scrap the works?
Powers on, goes through the Dell screen, stays running for about 30 seconds then just turns the entire system off by itself. Doesn't try to reboot over and over.
I reformatted the hard drive abiut 3 months ago. Have an authentic Windows CD, never registered it, worth trying to boot from that disk and reinstall or better just to scrap the works?
4
Posted on 6/16/14 at 1:35 pm to fightin tigers
Press F8 after the BIOS info screen disappears and turn on boot logging. Then maybe try Safe Mode and see what the file says. If you can't even get into Safe Mode, try booting memtest86+ and check for memory errors. If it checks out, try booting some Live CD with tools, like Parted Magic or a custom-built WinRE/PE environment. Then try to access the system drive, look for boot log file you tried to create, look at SMART values, boot sector, etc. If the hardware all seems to check out, then I guess you have nothing to lose trying the Windows Recovery features, but I'd still like to know WTF went wrong in the first place. I mean, I've never run Windows Recovery, and I've been using Windows since long before that feature existed.
Posted on 6/16/14 at 2:02 pm to fightin tigers
If it were missing you would have a message similar to this come up.
What OS are you running? It's pretty common on XP for the boot sector to become corrupted for no apparent reason.
What OS are you running? It's pretty common on XP for the boot sector to become corrupted for no apparent reason.
Posted on 6/16/14 at 3:12 pm to fightin tigers
quote:
Powers on, goes through the Dell screen, stays running for about 30 seconds then just turns the entire system off by itself.
What's the last thing you see on the screen before it powers off?
Posted on 6/16/14 at 4:46 pm to fightin tigers
When the Dell logo comes up, hit the F12 button until you hear the computer beep at you. This will take you to the boot menu. Run the Dell diagnostics and see where it bombs out.
Just from the description, it sounds like some sort of heat issue (CPU fan not turning on, thermal gel breaking down, etc).
Just from the description, it sounds like some sort of heat issue (CPU fan not turning on, thermal gel breaking down, etc).
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