Boot Errors

[Jester]

Hey guys and Gals,
I'm hoping you will be able to help me with a little problem ive been having

Basicaly its with one of my desktop machines, its been giving me some frustrating problems. About 1 in 4 attempts at turning the machine on it will boot fine and I can use it, however on the other 3 attempts I get some intresting reactions, sometimes the system all whirrs and comes to life but the monitor stays off, shining its orange standby light. Other times the screen does turn on but just after detecting the IDE devices it gives me a Boot Error and says press F1 to continue, if i press F1 it scrolls down a bit and says Boot Failure please insert boot disc into A: and press any key...

Another weird phenomonon is if I try to restart the machine either through the Start menu or the manual restart button, it will turn off but then do the annoying system turns on but no display.

First of all I thought it was a problem with the Motherboard but I've just replaced that but it hasent fixed the problem I've tried reformatting too but that does nothing, so I'm pretty certain its a hardware problem.

Thanks guys for any help you can give me,
Jester

 

[age123]

soming wrong with ur hdd cheake alll ide cables and post back

 

[Jester]

Just checked and all are snug and in place

 

[apj101]

hmmm
Maybe try rebuilding your boot record, although you say you have reformatted so that should have fixed any prob, depending on the type of reformat you did
try Using the Recovery Console to Replace the MBR
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkd_tro_ldau.asp

also check your boot order in your bios.
Oh maybe consider updating you bios, cant hurt!

 

[Praetor]

What are we dealing with? QUESTIONS 101.