[bjay]

Occasionally when I boot up, OS not found displays on black screen. I have tried several fixes, booting up with the start up disk and fixing the registery, formatted and reinstalled windows ME. When it does boot into windows, I hear a faint whining sound when the hard drive starts up. Is it failing?

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Have you gone into the Setup screen? Do so and enable the diagnostic bootup screen so you can see whaat is happening. This can be caused by somethng as simple as a bad CMOS battery, which should read just over 3 volts. You might try setting your BIOS defaults when you're in setup to see what happens, but after you've done that make sure you have the diagnostic screen.

Edited by Tyger, 31 October 2005 - 09:11 AM.

[Tyger]

Have you gone into the Setup screen? Do so and enable the diagnostic bootup screen so you can see whaat is happening. This can be caused by somethng as simple as a bad CMOS battery, which should read just over 3 volts. You might try setting your BIOS defaults when you're in setup to see what happens, but after you've done that make sure you have the diagnostic screen.

Edited by Tyger, 31 October 2005 - 09:11 AM.

[bjay]

I replaced the battery a couple of weeks ago. I went into setup and set it to show the boot up. Diagnostic screen should show me what?

I have replaced the cable from the hard drive to motherboard; I also have a new power supply (had major problems before that, computer dead); formatted and reinstalled the operating system; run fdisk and fdisk /mbr; checked to see if the partition is active; the computer just isn't seeing the hard drive when it won't start up. I'm at a loss.

[Tyger]

It could well be a failing hard drive. If you know the brand, download diagnostic software from the maker and run it to find it's condition. You can usually find software that can be run from a floppy.