Whole system gone...urgent help needed!

luceyliu

I was on windows 7 yesterday and worked perfectly but after turning it on a few minutes later it read reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device! Please help

tman

Do you have anything plugged into any of the usb ports?

luceyliu

Actually when I put it on the second time I did plug in the printer. Plugged everything out now but still not working!

doctorchick

Is this a laptop ? Any chance you could have knocked it so that the hard drive has come loose (doesn't need to be much). Had 2 laptops this week with exactly that problem.

If not then did the laptop shut down properly when you had been using it before. You said you had been using it and then went to turn it on a few minutes later. Was there any particular reason you had had to turn it off ?

luceyliu

It's a Desktop. No reason why I had to turn it off. Just forgot to print something so plugged in printer and when it turned on the message came up. Can't understand why. Should I just install windows 7 again?

doctorchick

Reason I asked why you had turned it off, I just wondered if you had encountered a particular error which had forced you to turn it off.

If this was one of my systems I would first ensure that no USB keys or SD cards or CDs/DVDs are in the machine as they can interfere with the boot process. If this doesn not resolve the problem then isolate it from the power,remove the side panel(or however you get into the guts) and make sure all the cables connecting the hard drives to both the drive and motherboard are pushed home firmly. Close the case up, power up again and see if that made an effect.

If not then you can try the system restore disks that came with the machine. They may have been pre-installed on your machine as a separate partition or may come as separate DVDs. This will take you through the restore and recovery process and will also tell you if there is something wrong with your disk (ie if it cannot detect disk then you may have a hard disk failure).

There are some instructions here: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/668-system-recovery-options.html

for a restore/recovery/repair of a windows 7 system.

Let us know how you get on.

JonathanAnon

My advice would not be not to reinstall yet. All you know currently is that there is an issue with booting to the hard drive:

This is because of either:
a) logical problem with the primary hard drive (boot sector may be messed up)
b) physical problem with the primary hard drive.
c) non hard drive issues: incorrect settings in BIOS, board fault, cable fault etc etc..

I guess the first thing to do is to go in to the BIOS (usually tapping F12 or F10 on startup) and see if the system is recognizing the hard drive and that the hard drive is listed first or second in the boot order. Once you have established this, you could then boot to your recovery disk and check your windows install for boot issues and logical hard drive issues.

luceyliu

I think my hard drive has failed. After trying to go through system restore it wasn't recognising anything and checked the bios and the cd/DVD rom is now set as the first in sequence for booting. Can't change this setting to the hard drive and no sign of it even acknowledging that it's there! Tried to install windows 7 on external hard drive but won't boot windows from USB.

Does this sound like my hard drive has failed? Appreciate the replies!

doctorchick

Must say, its not looking good for the hard drive. If there is important data on it then you could try putting it into another machine as a slave and see if it gets recognised and copy the data off. You can also download various bits of freeware to analyse disks - some even work if it seems that the machine cannot recognise the disk. The major disk manufacturers often have disk analysis software you can download off their websites to do disk checking and can tell you the state of the disk, some will even try and do repairs if it is a simple fault (boot record errors etc)

To be quite honest, if the disk is bad and their is nothing vital on it then you could try and get it replaced on waranty (if still valid) or just go and buy a new one - they are fairly cheap these days.

JonathanAnon

What I find odd is that
a) your system is reasonably new, judging by the fact that it is running Windows 7... or did you upgrade an old PC? and
b) The drive seems to be gone completely, usually you get pre-fail warnings of bad sectors, explorer errors, Error log errors etc etc.

When you go in to the BIOS can you see the hard drive listed under the boot devices?.. it should be identified as drive 0 and you should see the name of manufacturer and model...

Do you have a Windows CD that you can boot to, so that you can run chkdsk?

alan4cult

This problem seems very strange. What make/model is the computer?

luceyliu

It's actually a self build! I was convinced it was the hard drive that had failed last week but I was busy at work so I did not touch it the last week. My brother switched it on last night and it switched on without any problem! Odd how is that? Afraid it'll go again and lose everything so backing up online now. Unless when I was messing with it last week I just made sure all the connections were ok but stupidly I never checked it after to see if it had made a difference. Thanks very much for your help! Hopefully it was just windows 7 and my hard drive won't fail again for the time being

Hank Scorpio

Points to a bad connection to the hard drive or the bios configuration is conflicting.

If you have more 1 IDE/SATA connection(depending on your HD+mobo) try using it.

You may need to remove the cd-rom drive or whatever to achieve this and configure the boot sequence in the bios.

If its then booting perfectly you know its a cable connection problem.