c drive not recognized - unable to boot

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bill Reda
  • Start date Start date
B

Bill Reda

I have a HP 520C with windows XP Home

Recently I have difficulty booting up.
It will take 20 - 30 tries before successful.
When i turn on the cpu the power unit aand fan go on but
the computer does not boot. Nothing at all show's on
screen and drive light stays on steady. Once when I
booted to a diskette and tried to access the C drive I
got the message that the C drive was not recognized.
 
Hey Bill,

You say you see nothing on the screen when you power on, not even the bios
ininitialisation with the memory being scanned and all your devices being
listed prior to trying to boot windows?

I know its a daft question but I have to ask,

1. Is the monitor Plugged in and turned on at the mains, and at its own
power button. Does it have a power incicator light showing ?
2. Is the video lead plugged into the back of the pc.

If it was a windows problem or even a hard disk problem, you should still
see the bios initialisation screens up to the point where it tries to boot
windows xp. If you see nothing, then could be a more fundamental problem,
such as a blown cpu, bad memory, bad video controller, bad monitor.

If the system is still under warranty you should contact the supplier, if
not then take the case off and have a look inside. When you power on, does
the fan attatched to the cpu still work, if not, then cpu may have had it.

If you can see more than one memory module, try removing them and swapping
them around to try and determine if one has failed.

Does the video card have a tv output you could use to plug into your
television to eliminate the monitor as the cause of the problem.

Do you hear any warning beeps when you power the system on ?

Paul

When you booted from diskette you must have got something on the screen,
 
PAUL
THANKS FOR YOUR SUGGESTIONS. AFTER MANY TRIES TURNING
THE CPU ON AND OFF - SOMETIMES PROBABLY AS MANY AS 20 OR
MORE - THE COMPUTER WILL BOOT UP NORMALLY. ON THE
UNSUCCESFUL TRIES THE ARE NO BEEPS BUT WHEN IT IS
SUCCESSFUL THERE ARE SEVERAL BEEPS. ONCE STARTED EVERY
THING SEEMS TO WORK FINE.

BILL
 
For those 19 out of 20 times, you just get a completely black screen ?

Do you have a disk acivity LED, if so do you see any disk activity during
those 19 times when the system fails to boot.?

How old is the sytem, perhaps the motherboard battery needs replacing. When
the system does boot up, is the date and time correct ?

Paul
 
Yes the screen is completely black
The disk activity LED stays on steadily when it fails to
booy but blinks when the boot will be successful.
The system is just over a year old and when it boots up
yes the date and time are correct
-----Original Message-----
For those 19 out of 20 times, you just get a completely
Click to expand...
black screen ?
Bill
 
Hey Bill,

What I don't understand yet is if it was a disk/disk controller/disk cable
problem, I would still expect you to at least get the start of the bios
ininitialisation screens, certainly the heading with the name of the bios
and version number, the part where it sizes memory and identifies the cpu
type. It normally then goes on to size the ide channels and detect the
keyboard. If it was a disk problem, I could see it hanging at the ide
channel sizing stage but I don't get why it doesnt display the initial part
of the bios initialization. The only time I've seen something like this is
with an old pentium 450 cpu which had a damaged L2 cache, disabling the L2
cache in the bios would get a clean boot every time, but of course the
system ran very slowly.

When the system is up, go and see if there are any errors in the system
event log,

start/run
eventvwr.msc

Click on system in left pane. Look for any errors in the right pane flagged
by a white cross on a red circular background. You open the error in the
right pane by double clicking on it.
Look pariclularly at any related to timeouts, crc errors, parity errors,
files sytem, disk, disk controller, memory, logical disk manager.
Post any that look suspicious using the copy button below the arrow keys.
Click on the button to copy, and use right click/paste in the body or your
news reader editor.

Eliminate the hard disk, and ide channels from the problem.

First make an ms-dos boot disk.
To make a boot floppy, put a floppy disk in the drive, and go into My
Computer, right click on A: and select format, and select "Create an ms-dos
startup disk"..

Open the case and disconnect the ide cable or cables from the motherboard,
they will be attatched to the back of the cd drives and the hard disk. Trace
the cable to the motherboard.

When the system is powered up, go into the bios and make sure that one of
the boot options is to boot from floppy. At the same time, if memory doesn't
get sized as part of the bios initialization indicated by a counter
incrementing very fast, then look for a bios option such as Quick Boot ,
disable quick boot, or perhaps it called Test Memory, if so enable it. Exit
the bios and save settings, and system should restart.

If you can get it to boot from floppy consistently then you can run some
diagnostics.
Download and run the windows memory diagnostics. This will test memory, and
at the same time indirectly test the cpu.
Leave it running overnight or at least for 3 or 4 hours.
http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

If this then works ok, reconnect the hard disk, but only the hard disk,
leave the cd drives for the moment. If the problem reappears, then it could
be ide controller, cable or disk. Try connecting the disk to the other ide
channel and use a different cable. If the hard disk is ATA66 or greater, it
needs to be one of the 80 wire cable, this cable still has a 40 pin
connector, it just uses to wires per pin to eliminate noise. If still no
consistent boot, then visit the disk manufacturers website and download
their disk diagnostics, which you put on the boot floppy you already created
and see if they find anything.

Paul
 
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