Help, Is my HDD Controller going south??

  • Thread starter Thread starter William Cheng
  • Start date Start date
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William Cheng

Hi all,

My wife's computer which is a amalgamation of all my older upgraded parts
won't boot up today. Its an older BX440 board with a P3 600Mhz chip in it.
She was working away, then got a spooling error while she was trying to
print. We shut down, and upon reboot, the system hangs with the boot prompt
at DMI pool... it doesn't even load into WindowsXP. I tried to boot to
floppy, and when I do, at the A: prompt, I try the C:\ prompt and get
"Invalid Drive Specification". I go into bios, and it properly detects my
drives, but I can't seem to access them. Has my HDD controller fried?

Thanks,
William
 
William Cheng said:
Hi all,

My wife's computer which is a amalgamation of all my older upgraded parts
won't boot up today. Its an older BX440 board with a P3 600Mhz chip in it.
She was working away, then got a spooling error while she was trying to
print. We shut down, and upon reboot, the system hangs with the boot prompt
at DMI pool... it doesn't even load into WindowsXP. I tried to boot to
floppy, and when I do, at the A: prompt, I try the C:\ prompt and get
"Invalid Drive Specification". I go into bios, and it properly detects my
drives, but I can't seem to access them. Has my HDD controller fried?
Click to expand...

Check out your hardware:

1. Make sure your CPU and case temperatures are OK
and that all the fans are working.

2. Reseat all the modules and cables inside your computer.

3. Clear CMOS and set up your BIOS again.

4. Run "memtest86" (download from http://www.memtest86.com)
to thoroughly check out your memory. You should get
zero errors.

5. Run a full set of hardware diagnostics. ("diag378.exe",
downloadable from ftp://ftp1.dell.com/diags, after a few
complaints, will run on most non-Dell computers.)
You should get zero errors.

-- Bob Day
 
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