computer won't boot

Man eating cow

hey i have a problem with my compter, it was working fine last week, (i didnt install any new programs lately). and when i tried to boot up my computer today, i kept hearing a tic tic tic sound until i turned it off. i tried booting up from the windows xp cd rom but that didnt work either.
im sorry im giving vague information i haven't a clue whats going on.

cheers in advance

jessy

that clicking noise you heard is prob the hard drive failing. can you get as far as the BIOS.

Man eating cow

yeah i can get into the bios, is there anything i can do to check the status of the hard disk? Before the windows loads a screen comes up. listing my dvd rom and cd rw and it recognises the hard disk as well,

Bass.exe

.... and then??? Does it hang there for several minutes, and then give an error message?


This sounds like HDD failure... although I thought my own HDD was failing... as it turns out, it was just a loose connection. Hmm, maybe you should try that.
Try opening the case, reseating the cables on the HDD, and turning on the computer again. If that doesn't work... well. Usually when a HDD fails, it's dead.
Sometimes you can coax them back to life by putting them in the freezer for a while. DON'T DO THIS. Yet, anyway. Try reseating the cables, then get back to us.

jessy

No there nothing that you can do from the BIOS but if you can get that far the isn’t most likely not any thing else. Open the box and just make sure the Molex connections are in place. it this dosent work then im afraid the drive is gone.

duridian

Yep like they said, it usually is the hard drive. Is it set in the bios to give the option of booting from the cdrom? If not maybe this is why you couldn't boot from the windows cd.

Man eating cow

no i have it set to boot from the cd rom first and then from the hard disk. before this happenened i was able to boot from the cd rom does anyone know how to start the os in safe mode. i cant remember off hand

jessy

press F8 before win logo screen.

Bass.exe

I'm guessing this computer is a few years old. Still using IDE cables on your Hard Disk?

Seriously. Check the connections on the Hard Disk... and also the CD-ROM drive.

Especially if you have both of those on one cable, with the Hard Disk set to Master, and the CD drive set to Slave. That could be the cause of your problems.
Go check the IDE cable!

smorton

that happened when my dad spilled his drink on the keyboard and didnt tell me. the best thing to do is try to replace all the components in turn and boot. this is when you need a friend with a computer. bring it to his house and swap bit

NocturnalDonkey

Take out the hard drive. Put it into another computer as a slave drive. If you can access it, try to run scandisk on it. That will either fix it, or break it for ever. (If you can access it above first. Copy any important data off it.)

Man eating cow

ah cheers thanks a mil for the advice, but nothing worked. the hard drive is feckered..

just gonna have to buy a new one.

Happy new year to ye all