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Computer no longer booting

H

hisse

Junior Member
I had recently had trouble with wmp10 so I installedwindows media player 11 and restarted the computer, upon restarting the computer i find it will no longer boot, it will make it through the bios but when it would normally load the boot loader it just goes blank and hangs at a black screen.

If I remove one or both of the hard drives I can boot from the windows install cd but it will not recognize that they are there.(obviously since they are disconnected) And when I reconnect them it goes to start the cd but hangs the same way it would if I had tried to start windows.

It's a dell dimension 8300, runnign 2 - 120gb hd's, 4 x 256mb memory and 2.66ghz p4. Any ideas as to what may be the problem?
 
So as long as you have 1 HD in, does not matter which one you can boot? But if both are plugged in they will not? Are they on cable select? If so you might want to try putting them on master slave configuration.
 
no it only boots when i remove the master drive, even then only to cd(for obvious reasons)
I thought about setting the slave drive to master so i can atleast boot into the 2nd installation(i'm guessing that would work)
What could cause this to happen suddenly?
Is there any way I can recover what was on the drive(if that is the problem)?
 
Well, it's possible the board on the bottom of that HD has gone bad. You should try making that one the slave and see if it will boot. Also what if you put the troubled drive in on it's own cable alone? Does the computer still have issues booting? If you can't boot at all with the problem drive hooked up then you could try getting a USB 2 external case for the problem HD and hook it up through USB to see if can copy data off of it. If that doesn't work the drive is too badly damaged and your only options would be to try a circuit board on the bottom of the drive to see it works correctly. I've never replaced the board on an HD so I really don't know much about doing it. The only other option to get data off would be expensive, like Drivesavers.com.
 
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