PC won't boot properly- stuck in a loop

[pilotchase]

Earlier I was reinstalling winblows and I was using my roommate's computer to download some drivers and it "died" while I was using it. Now when I boot it up it reads the mouse and keyboard, recognizes the Ram, CD-Rom, HD, and floppy. . .and stops. It doesn't do anything. Windows does not start to load like normal. If I press any key it reboots and starts the whole loop all over. It's an old Gateway p120,40 megs of ram, and 2 gig HD, I think. Runs Wim98. I don't even know how to trouble shoot something like this. The only thing I managed to do was getting to setup by pressing F1. Nothing helpful there. She'll be back on Monday so I have until then to fix this.

Any help is greatly appreciated.


Shayna

 

[reitz]

By "died", what exactly do you mean? What were you doing when it happened? Did you do anything to the computer that could have caused the problem? More info, please.

 

[pilotchase]

Well, I had left it idle for a while and the screensaver had kicked in. It's password protected and I don't know the password so I just shut the computer off. (ctrl-alt-delete wouldn't close the screensaver) When I rebooted it, it started the problem.

I had been downloading progs to make a boot disk. I was wondering if that could screwed something up. I tried putting a boot disk in but it won't get far enough to boot off the disk.



Shayna

 

[IsOs]

Are you sure that your boot disk is working properly? - Test it with another computer. You'll probably need sys.com to fix your problem so make sure you have that in the boot disk as well.

Then, in the BIOS setup, go to the section where you can change the boot sequence. Make sure that the first boot device is A.

Reboot from floppy. Issue a DIR C:
If you can see drive C, ok, type sys C:
Remove the floppy then reboot.

Goodluck.

On second thought, call the owner of the computer. Inform the owner what happened and hope the computer did not trash any valuable data.

 

[reitz]

What message does it give you when it hangs and stops loading? It sounds like it might be starting to load windows and then stops for whatever reason.

 

[MiniMe69]

First thing to do...

1. Grab the lastest classified ads...
2. Look for a new place to stay...
3. Cause your gonna be dead...
4. Come monday...

You can try going into Safe Mode...F8 after the boot screen. Running MSCONFIG and turning off some of the start-up options and see if that works. Or Trying booting with a win98 floppy and run scandisk on C: Maybe when you turned it off when it was running you corrupted some files. Windows doesn't like to be shut off improperly.

 

[pilotchase]

Thank you Mini Me, I feel so much better now. Well, no classifieds for me, I'm required to live on campus this year.

Okay, I made a fresh boot disk and managed to boot it into safe mode off of it. Well, it just can't seem to find drive C. CD to C:, C:\, C:\Windows only goes to goes to C:\ briefly and then throws me back to A:\. I tried running scandisk, but it only scanned the A drive. Whenever I try and access anything on the boot disk, I get this error "CDR101:Not ready reading Drive E. . .abort, retry, fail. . .Bad Command or file name" What really worries me is when it first boots it says "Hard Disk 0 WDC. . ." Would zero be the size it is reading the HD as?

I'm waiting to here back from my roommate. I just hope I can fix this somehow without her losing everything that was on her comp.


Shayna

 

[reitz]

When you see "Hard Disk 0 WDC. . ." it just means that the drive listed is the first one installed. If she had a second drive, it would say "Hard Disk 1..."

If you boot without a boot disk and just wait for it to stop, what do you see on the screen?

 

[pilotchase]

Okay, I just wasn't sure about that 0.

Without the boot disk this is what comes up:

AMIBIOS (C)1992 American Megatrends inc
BIOS Version 1.00.05 BSOT

Gateway 2000
Pentium 120

0049152 KB

Please Wait. . .

Keyboard. . . Detected
Mouse. . . Detected

Hard Disk 0 installed WDC. . .
CD-Rom Drive Installed Toshiba CD-Rom

Floppy A: installed

That's where it stops. . .if I press any key it reboots and starts over.

How can I get it to recognize the C drive? It knows the HD is installed, it just can't seem to recognize the C drive at all.


thanks,


Shayna

 

[MiniMe69]

Maybe u need to reset the BIOS. Everything on that screen is related to the BIOS loading. If you can get into the BIOS (CMOS) then load defaults. Or else you can try to reset the BIOS by locating a jumper on the motherboard itself. Hopefully this will help you out...