Re: Has part of this motherboard failed?

km wrote:
On Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:46:31 +0100, Jaimie Vandenbergh
<jaimie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wed, 26 Aug 2009 08:27:43 +0100, km <> wrote:

I put together a PC at the beginning of last year, for a Charity I
help.

This week it would not boot up. The WinXP options appear but it will
not progress to Safe Mode or Last Configuration could not get to C:
prompt. I put the WinXP disk in to do a repair but could not progress
beyond "Set up is starting Windows".
I've seen that before in cases where the Windows disk was unable to
parse the structure on the disk enough - basically it has wedged
trying to read the master boot record.

If you have a tool that can rewrite the MBR (there's surely one on the
UBCD) then try that.

However, since swapping in a PATA disk did the same, I don't hold much
hope that this is actually what you're seeing. Perhaps the Windows
boot disk needs ye olde F6 drivers-onna-floppy to see the storage at
all?

Do you have/can you make an XPsp3 disk, or use a Vista disk to see?
They have a lot more SATA drivers than older XPs.

Cheers - Jaimie


I tried a different PSU with no luck.

Decided to give VISTA a try as you suggested. After what I assume was
a loading of basic drivers, there is nothing like WinXP text running
at the bottom to tell you what is going on, the screen stopped at the
fancy VISTA greeny-yellow blank page. The cursor was there but
everything seemed to be at a standstill.

Just when I moved to call it a day the screen progressed to ask what
language I wanted to use. It is now expanding files and I think the
installation is underway.

Hope I am not being premature.

Yeah on most of my newish PCs I've built (2008-09) the Vista installation takes a while when you go thru the first sets of options, but strangely on a PC I had built in mid 2007 it was really quick to go thru the first bit like it should be... not sure why these other PCs take ages but anyway its normal and it should install just fine.
.

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