parent's computer giving boot error

[hdeck]

i haven't been home long but today is the first time i've noticed problems on their machine. earlier the computer started randomly freezing. i checked "my computer" and noticed that the processor was only running at 700mhz (it's an amd 1600+) so i went into the bios and fixed it. i proceeded to remove spyware with spybot, do a disk cleanup, and defrag the drive.

now the computer won't boot. it goes to the nvidia boot agent and does some nonsense about a network boot with the MAC address as a series of F's followed by DHCP and a rotating | symbol from what i can tell. pressing escape says boot failed insert system disk. i've looked in the bios and don't see anything in any menu about a network boot.

the mobo is a Biostar M7NCG -- i've never had problems with it before. any ideas before i start replacing parts again?

 

[cubby1223]

Sounds like the board is not able to boot to the hard drive, so the bios is trying the "boot other devices" and is trying to use the network boot rom. Does the bios recognize the hard drive or not? If it does, you might be able to connect the drive into another computer & run chkdsk against the drive.

 

[Jiggz]

Sounds like the hdd has a corrupted boot record or MBR. You can either try fixing this (using recovery console) or you can do a repair installation using XP CD.

 

[Bozo Galora]

Sounds like running the CPU not at 10.5 X 133 may have corrupted the HDD

Does PCI lock even work at that lower speed? (7 X 100???)

I would go for a manuf drive test utility run, then a low level format or a new HDD.

edit- just noticed the board has "force 100fsb jumper" on mobo

The BIOS is overclocking friendly; you can change the CPU multiplier setting by 1 MHz steps as well as letting you adjust the on-board CPU, AGP, DRAM, and IGP Voltage Regulators, for improved overclocking potential. In addition, Biostar includes a force-the-system-bus-frequency-to-100-MHz jumper on the board, so that you can recover from that "Oops, I've overclocked too far!" situation. I'm glad to see that jumper, since not every nForce motherboard has it (even though it was on NVIDIA's reference design), which has caused major problems for more than a few overclockers.
http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=247

 

[nweaver]

that nonsense is network booting (aka PXE boot)