[Primasapere]

Okay, here's the story:

Last night, after having connected my computer to my college's network and played games and browsed the internet successfully, I decided to retire for the evening and sleep.

I left my computer on at night.

This morning, I tried using my computer, and something was critically wrong. I turned on the monitor, and was puzzled to find myself at a Windows Installation screen (the screen you get when you boot from the Windows CD, with options to Install, Repair, or Exit).

I had left my Windows installation CD in the CD tray during my move back to college, so I can understand being at the install screen if my computer decided to reboot itself at night for some reason or another. But the problem is, I exited the installation process, rebooted my computer, but now it won't start Windows up at all from the hard drive.

I've changed my boot sequence in the BIOS to put CD-ROM before and after Hard Drive, but either way, it boots from the CD. I'm leery of taking CD rom out of the mix entirely, but if that's the idea, I'll do it.

The troubling bit is just that it worked so well last night, and I left it sitting at the Desktop, with no processes running except for a mouse program that came with my mouse, PC-Cillin Antivirus, and a program that came with my video card purchase. I don't know what could have caused my computer to reboot, at caused it to boot from the CD, which it hadn't done when I first booted it up at college, despite the Windows installation CD having been in the CD-ROM.

So. That's the problem. Should I change the boot order to not even check the CD-ROM, or what? Is there any sort of error that could have caused this?

I should also mention that, during my frequent restarts when I was exploring the situation, my computer wouldn't recognize my Slave Hard Drive for a while, which isn't the drive Windows is installed on, but still. I'm not sure what the issue is.

System Specs, as far as I remember, because I can't get my computer past the boot sequence:

AMD Athlon 3000+ processor (1.84 GHz)
ABIT AV8 motherboard
1GB DDRAM
Windows XP Professional SP2

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[Advertisements]

Okay, to update:

I changed the boot order to Hard Drive -> Floppy -> CD-ROM... didn't fix it.

I changed the boot order to Hard Drive -> Disabled - > Disabled... didn't fix it.

I changed the option that allowed booting from other devices to disallow such activity... didn't fix it.

The whole time during this process, my CD-ROM has been empty, and I don't even have a Floppy drive attached to my computer.

But after it gets past the memory check, and the drive identification (I do believe it's recognizing both drives now), it says Disk Boot Failure, and asks me to insert the boot disk and press enter. If the CD is in the drive, it boots from the CD no matter what options I have selected for boot order.

[Primasapere]

Okay, to update:

I changed the boot order to Hard Drive -> Floppy -> CD-ROM... didn't fix it.

I changed the boot order to Hard Drive -> Disabled - > Disabled... didn't fix it.

I changed the option that allowed booting from other devices to disallow such activity... didn't fix it.

The whole time during this process, my CD-ROM has been empty, and I don't even have a Floppy drive attached to my computer.

But after it gets past the memory check, and the drive identification (I do believe it's recognizing both drives now), it says Disk Boot Failure, and asks me to insert the boot disk and press enter. If the CD is in the drive, it boots from the CD no matter what options I have selected for boot order.

[Primasapere]

At the very worst, I can at least wipe my Hard Drives again, and start anew, but it's such a pain to reload my software and reconfigure settings and all.

But... I can't do any of that for a couple weeks, on account of not having any of my disks here at college.

Any suggestion would be great. I'm really desperate for a computer that'll work and run how I need it to.

[Stasiek]

do you have a roomate?
have you been using a firewall? do you have remote access activated? if so disable it.

if you can get past the post start in safe mode if possible.
to my knowledge you more then likely will have to reinstall the windows

[Retired Tech]

Try here

http://support.micro...kb;en-us;304449

Then here if you need to

http://support.micro...kb;en-us;307545