What is..

[PicassoCT]

..wrong, when your PC freezes right after BIOS&HardwarCheck Monitor showed up and you can boot only by entering the windows CD into a drive, and skip the "boot from cd"-option?

I know this is a noobish question, but it must be answered, to ensure progress of worx

[Regret]

..wrong, when your PC freezes right after BIOS&HardwarCheck Monitor showed up and you can boot only by entering the windows CD into a drive, and skip the "boot from cd"-option?

I know this is a noobish question, but it must be answered, to ensure progress of worx

Reinstalling windows might fix that. Or resetting bios. You'll have to set whatever is needed to be set in it after.

Plug out power supply from pc, take out motherboard battery (it's usually a small round one), wait a min, put everything back and start again.

[aegis]

instead of pulling the battery/power, you can just use the cmos reset jumper.

[Regret]

instead of pulling the battery/power, you can just use the cmos reset jumper.

Yeaaa I'm sure he would have no problem with figuring that out.

[aegis]

uh yeah. move jumper (generally the one closest to the battery) to cover the other pin. move it back.

[Caydr]

Do you have specific error messages?

A common problem I've seen is when you change something in your computer's setup and the BIOS decides that this would be a good time to silently tweak your startup options, removing your boot hard drive from the boot sequence.

Then you get a message that would lead you to believe (wrongly) that there's a problem with your Windows install. To correct this, just go into BIOS and select your correct boot drive, but leave your DVD drive before it in case you need to do a recovery of some kind.

-----

Or, you could have accidentally wrecked your Windows install by inadvertently marking the wrong partition as active. Vista and 7 both create a hidden partition for evil purposes and in rare situations this can cause problems. Putting in your Windows disc (if you have Vista or 7), choosing "repair my windows" then "fix boot error" or something like that, will correct your problem in that case.

Just a couple of wild guesses. Actual error messages would let me narrow it down a lot better.

[PicassoCT]

Not one Error message- that makes it so difficult troubleshooting

just a blinking _
forever
frozzen
No sign of activity.. and not always, just random, sometimes the error reappears everytime i reset, the other day, everything workx fine- or i have to use the dirty workaround of the windows-cd...

[Caydr]

So as soon as POST finishes, you get a black screen with a blinking underscore, no messages prior to that at all?

What version of Windows are you running? Does this happen like 50% of the time? 10%?

[SinbadEV]

hard-drive is getting old and is taking too long to "spin up" ?

[Caydr]

POST does a basic check on the hard drive, but definitely doesn't rule it out.

An inconsistent problem like this is really hard to diagnose since it could be a lot of different things.

I would recommend running orthos overnight as a very basic test to (mostly) rule out a CPU problem, and if you know how to make a dos startup disk, make one and run memtest86+ overnight to rule out the RAM and its associated subsystems.

Before doing any testing, unplug anything that doesn't absolutely need to be plugged in for the computer to function: power cable, mouse, keyboard, monitor. Unplug your LAN and everything else while attempting to diagnose a problem but you can plug it in otherwise.

I'm hoping Orthos doesn't screw up because it could indicate a problem with RAM, CPU, or even your motherboard. If it runs without any problems, then those things are (probably) clear. Safe to say it's not the GPU, so once you rule out the CPU and RAM, you get into things that you might have to spend your own time and/or money to test let alone fix.

If neither Orthos nor Memtest+ indicate a problem, it's probably an early warning sign of hard drive failure. Other components in your computer generally wouldn't prevent Windows from starting up. If that's the case, you will definitely want to make an external copy of anything important on your hard drive as soon as possible.

(I said to unplug your LAN in particular because some guy I work with, his computer wouldn't boot because of a LAN cable problem, so I guess anything's possible)

[Forboding Angel]

uh yeah. move jumper (generally the one closest to the battery) to cover the other pin. move it back.

9 times out of 10, "CMOS" is written right next to the pins also (it'll be 2 pins in the middle of nowhere, somewhere reasonably close to the battery).

Sometimes there is a jumper already on one pin, sometimes there isn't. If there isn't and you don't have a jumper, a penny will work just fine (copper coin).

[PicassoCT]

thx will try orthos, before applying a defibrillator to the mother of all boards

Srsly thx for the advice, will return maps for it one day..

[very_bad_soldier]

Is Orthos still needed? AFAIK it was only made because prime95 did not suport multiple cores at that time. Nowadays just prime95 is the way to go IMO...