[dmermal]

I have a PC, Pentium 3 650, 512 mb ram, hard drive, cdrom and floppy....

The other day it turned off because of a power outage and after that it has been acting strange. I'd randomly get blue screens and then it wouldn't boot from the hard drive. I figured the hard drive had died and so I put another one in and went to load windows, well I couldn't boot from any of my disks and I have three different disks I tried. So I figured it could have been the cd rom, switched that one with another one...both drives are relatively new within the year....I still couldn't boot into setup.

I checked in BIOS and everything is setup right, I've loaded this PC before, in fact, three weeks ago was the last time. I tried using a floppy to boot as well and wasn't able to boot from that and it's strange because all I get is a cursor in the upper left corner of the screen...nothing else.

I am wondering if anyone else has had this problem and can give me any suggestions....thanks...

[Advertisements]

hi ya

you mentioned putting in a new drive which i presume to mean a new cd/dvd drive ...check to see if the jumpers are correct (ie either set as the slave or set as the master) another thing you could check for is to see if 'cable select' is set on the jumpers, from personal experience they are nothing but trouble and to my opinion the old master and slave is far more stable.....also make sure your ide lead to the drives are a1

hope this helps ya getting the pesky thing sorted

michael

[groove18]

hi ya

you mentioned putting in a new drive which i presume to mean a new cd/dvd drive ...check to see if the jumpers are correct (ie either set as the slave or set as the master) another thing you could check for is to see if 'cable select' is set on the jumpers, from personal experience they are nothing but trouble and to my opinion the old master and slave is far more stable.....also make sure your ide lead to the drives are a1

hope this helps ya getting the pesky thing sorted

michael

[dmermal]

I guess I did leave out a crucial peice of information. My motherboard runs all the POST operations, it finds the CD ROM drive and the hard drive when it boots it's just that when it's time to boot from either of these devices it goes to that blank black screen with a cursor in the upper left hand corner. This is a really strange problem....I'm rather informed when it comes to computer hardware, software, and networking...i am a computer help desk tech for one of the county's in WI, so I have some knowledge. I assure all of you who read this I've checked all the stupid little things, it's something else. I thought that maybe there is a boot sector virus and that's why it's not letting me boot.

Any other suggestions are welcome.....Thanks...

[Doby]

Hi,

Try another psu if you have a spare, thats all I can think of at the moment.

Rick

[The one]

hmmm sounds strange i have a few suggestions which b4 any1 says are nothing to do with it i would stay off by taking all the cards and everything out and putting them back in and reseting the cmos aswell and also trying to have just the hdd another suggestion would be to try flshing the bios, and also i have only ever once expeianced such a thing and that was when i had my usb pen drive plugged in when i turned it on it did the same thing, u probably dont have 1 of those but just incase u do, hope this helps.