David J Brooks
Well, it looks like its time to do something about my 8 year old MDG
P4 computer.
Its been acting up again the last few weeks, not booting. It does
after a number of reboots. I get a boot fail, system halted, or a full
DOS screen with all my memory numbers and a few other things, and at
the bottom i get press f12 to boot form network or f1 to enter set up.
I enter set up, scroll over to exit and it boots.
Its an old machine, slow and USB 1.1 to boot, but its calibrated well
for my Epson 2400 prints, so i'm leaning on fixing it one more time.
Going in Saturday for a look see. Hopefully adding a new HD and
mapping my stuff off the old one will work. The HD was upgraded 3
years ago and never really worked well after. Many boot problems, but
it would work, eventually.
It's been a while since I have had to troubleshoot a computer, but these
are some things I remember.
If you've got everything you need to keep from the HDD backed up onto
another drive, try booting to a command prompt and run "chkdsk" to see
if it reports any errors on the HDD.
Or if you haven't backed up everything you need, boot it however you
have to get it up and copy everything you need to keep before you run
"chkdsk". "Chkdsk" shouldn't hurt anything, but why take chances.
If it's a FAT32 system, try "scandisk".
I'd also look to replacing the CMOS battery. It may be just losing the
settings when shut down. That would account for it booting after you
exit setup.
If "chkdsk" reports errors, you can use it with the /f switch to "fix"
errors.
It may also have corrupted the boot sector on the HDD. Use "fdisk /mbr"
with Windows 95, 98, 2000 or NT and "fixmbr" (have to boot from the
installation CD and choose recovery) for XP or Vista.
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