Computer crashing question

[jgcable]

My sons PC has a strange reoccuring problem.
Its an 1800 Pentium running Windows XP Pro.
Occassionally, his computer will not boot up. I only get the black DOS looking screen. I go into system set up (the blue screen) and the computer can't detect the hard drive.
I click on autodetect and it still can't find it.
I break out the 7 floppy start up discs and I am able to get her working again. I have also removed the ribbon cables going to the hard drive and switched them with new ones. The computer boots up and works perfectly and then a few days later the same thing happens.
Any ideas? Could it be the motherboard, the hard drive, the ram?
Thanks a ton in advance!

[OnlineStageGear]

Re: Computer crashing question

Could really be anything, but it sounds most likely that the boot sector is flakey, possibly the drive is at fault. If you have the XP CD, pop it in there and go to the recovery console. Run FIXMBR as well as FIXBOOT. If that doesn't do it, and you know you way around your CMOS, see if you have the option to tell it not to detect the drives every time it boots. You can tell it No Device on each one. After you do that, use the Detect IDE Devices in the main menu and once it has them, it will just continue to use those settings rather that trying to detect the devices each time. That will speed up your boot time as well. You can also try putting your drive on IDE2.

Matt

[OnlineStageGear]

Re: Computer crashing question

Just thought of one other thing. If a drive is jumered incorrectly like for a Master with a slave when it doesn't have a slave, you will sometimes get the same intermittent failed boot.

Matt

[stevieb91]

Re: Computer crashing question

Nothing a glass of water won't fix.....

[RacerX]

Re: Computer crashing question

Time for a new hard drive, dude.