CRASH! System crashed tonight, what to do... UPDATE!

[Azurik]

I came home and found out my computer crashed tonight. Checking another networked computer, it appears the computer crashed at 9PM EST.

During BIOS, after it detects primary and secondary drives... it stalls and says nothing. Booting directly from my master HD gave an error message of "SEC Master HDD Error". What is this? Also, when I tickered on trying to boot it, on one occasion is also says NTLDR error.

I checked everything in BIOS and it seems fine. CPU temperature is running at 114 F and general mobo is running 87 F. Everything else checked out ok from glancing it.

Please tell me my hard drive isn't erased and it's only a boot sector error...

UPDATE: I got a hold of my 2003 Norton System Works, and it doesn't let me boot from CD. Instead, it still stalls on the first screen with the option of "reboot", "network reboot", or DEL for setup.

After a while, it does two beeps, pauses, and does another beep. All short beeps. I can't figure out what this means from the beep table online.

After this a screen allows me to boot from CD or from my hard drive. I choose CD and Norton pops up but I can't choose System Doctor or anything. It just scans my boot sector and says there's a master boot record and it's not infected. It then dumps me to A:/ where I can't find any .exe commands besides.

The following info is only what I can pull:

Master Boot Records

MEMORY --- SCANNED = YES, INFECTED = NO
MAXTOR BOOT RECORDS --- SCANNED = 1, INFECTED = 0
BOOT RECORDS --- SCANNED = 0, INFECTED = 0
FILES --- SCANNED = 0, INFECTED = 0

 

[lobadobadingdong]

pull everything from the motherboard exept your cpu, hsf, and atx power connectors (and leave your front panel connectors of course) and try turning on the system you should get a beep code of long short long indicating missing/bad memory. if you don't get that error then it's likely your mobo or proc is fried, get a known good proc to test. if you get the memory beep code, next step is to install your memory, and try again, you should get (assuming you don't have on-board graphics) a long long short code indincating missing/bad video card, if you get this code, then plug in your mouse/keyboard, and get into your bios, reset to basic defaults, and re-configure your bios. then plug in power and ide to your optical drive and try again, if you get to the no os found, then get a bootable cd and see if you can boot to it by itself. if you can't then your problem is not likely your hard drive and is somewhere else in the sytstem, test with another known good optical drive. if it works then plug in your hard drive and again boot to the bootable cd (preferably your os cd) if it will boot to the cd, then check to see if the cd can recognize your hdd, if you can't then you have likely lost your hard drive or it needs to be tested further with a disk utility....see the hdd's manufacturer's web site for thier recommended utilites. some hdd's can be salvaged, some can't. if you can boot to the OS cd (assuming win2k or xp) at the first chance select "r" to boot to the repair console at the console log into the volume and key these commands at the c:\ prompt

fixboot<return> and follow instructions accepting defaults
fixmbr<return> and follow instructions accepting defaults
chkdsk /r<return> and follow instructions accepting defaults

if you simply have corrupt boot files, master boot records, or invalid/corrupt files on the rest of you hdd, those 3 should set you up.

 

[L1FE]

I've had this problem, and it was sadly related to my PSU. What kind of PSU do you have? What I did until I got the new PSU was reboot with one of my harddrives disconnected (the slave, etc) and see if that helps. The problem with PSU problems it that it can cause a number of other problems seemingly unrelated to PSUs.