Computer won't boot up -help please

OneADay

baywood wrote: »

it is strange because sometimes when it is trying to do something it seems to stop and then try again and repeats the same process and if we manage to get to try to boot from cd drive it says boot failure. it is going out the window soon

If the data on disk is important - suggest you stop playing with it.
Get the hard disk out of it and put it into an external hard drive case - plug into another pc and take your data off it while you can. It could be something as minor as battery drained on the motherboard - easy to replace - but its guesswork...or serious as disk fried or motherboard fried.

baywood_2

When he manages to get into bios which he can now do and selects to boot from disc, it then brought up black screen about starting windows in safe mode or normally etc he selected last known good settings etc and hit enter we had first part of windows then nothing then monitor goes black press restart black screen again you can hear hd trying to spin he has tried the hard drive in another computer but it won't read it

GunJack

while in the BIOS screen, open the CD drive and put the bootdisk in the tray and close it again. Then, when you change the boot order to boot from the CD drive first and hdd second, remember to save the settings on exiting the BIOS (usually F10 on most BIOS types, but will tell you on the screen).

So, now you're ready to exit the BIOS, with the bootCD ALREADY IN THE DRIVE.

when you now exit the BIOS and the pc begins the boot-up procedure, look out for a message along the lines of "press any key to boot from CD". You may have to hit a key twice (on some machines, to confirm the choice) to activate the CD boot.

look at this post
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.php?p=42796712&postcount=4

for details of hiren's and avira bootCDs. It is poss that you have malware on your hdd which is preventing a correct boot. Remember to burn the disks with the ISO image in order for it to be bootable...use nero or imagburn to do this, as both are capable of burning images to disk.

codheadling

do you have a copy of windows xp as you need to run the recovery console to repair your master boot record (MBR) if not you can download and burn a recovery cd from herehttp://forums.pcpitstop.com/index.php?/topic/150212-boot-to-recovery-console-wo-xp-cd/
this only contains and will only load the xp recovery console,change the boot order of your computer to boot from cd, when prompted press r for recovery,if it asks for administrator password hit the enter key then type chkdsk /r then hit enter again,hopefully this will repair any faults.If your desktop has a floppy drive you can download the same files from microsoft but they only offer the option to create them on 6 floppy disks http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310994

codheadling

have a look at this thread https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/3033028
it is quite a common problem with xp, but fixable

two_for_one_2

Pull all your USB connections out and try again.
I expect the portable drive was USB, is that still plugged in?

Also your description is not very clear.

IE what screens do you see?

All black?

A 'boot' screen, with things like press F1 to enter setup?

Or screen asking if you and to boot into safe mode?

baza52

if you have a usb wireless keyboard pressing keys at post will not allways work. Have you tried accessing bios with another keyboard?

baywood_2

codheadling wrote: »

have a look at this thread https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/3033028
it is quite a common problem with xp, but fixable

This was exactly the problem but he cannot get it to boot from cd , it was asking please select boot device even though in the bios the cd is selected.

ddoris

After making any changes in the bios you must save and exit if you don't the changes won't work. This is nearly always done by pressing f10 and then enter. It will say how to do this.
It may be best to select fail-safe defaults first in the bios menu, save, and then go in again and change boot order.

baywood_2

He has done this as i saw him do it, so not really sure what to do next, other than trying to hook the hard drive up to something else and recover the stuff from there as in a previous post. The pc is not worth anything other than the stuff on the hard drive so don't want to get pay someone if i don't have to