Ok, so in short, my computer won't boot up. I hit the power button, I get the post/bios screen, it's all peachy, until the monitor goes off, and the system restarts. I then get the Windows screen saying that it didn't successfully start last time, with the regular Safe Mode, Last Known Good Config, and Start Normally options. The worrisome part is that I swapped in another IDE hard drive that I know works (it's running Windows on another computer right now), and I got the exact same errors. It's possible there's a motherboard issue (I plan to RMA it soon on unrelated problems pertaining to video display), but never something like this.
Some background: A while back a friend convinced me to try to install Linux again (last time I had to wipe the hard drive to get Windows back, and I wasn't very eager). It went ok, but the Linux Kernal was corrupted, so we were going to reinstall it. We deleted the partition Linux was on with the intention of reformatting it and trying again. The only problem was that GRUB was still looking for Linux, and wouldn't let me boot into Windows. Eventually I remembered my Admin password and used Windows Recovery to do the "fixmbr" command, and I thought everything was peachy.
It wasn't. Windows started up normally, and asked to do a disk check, so I said yes, like it was supposed to. It was going fine, until the third stage, when it just froze. The HD stopped spinning, and nothing happened for about 5 minutes, so I figured it was frozen, and restarted my computer. Bad idea. Windows tried starting, but something was corrupted in the boot file. It would flash a BSOD at me and restart before I could read the BSOD. After some frustration, I eventually tried to clear the Master Boot Record again in Windows Recovery. The BSOD was gone, but I was getting errors saying the NTLDR file was missing. I copied the NTLDR and the ntloader.com files (or whatever they were, don't remember exactly) from Windows CDs, and I stopped getting those errors. Unfortunately, I'm now where I stated at the beginning of the post.
At this point, I can't even tell if I do something right or not, because all HDs seem to act the same on that computer. My next plan of attack is to find a SATA-compatible computer (I've got three, the non-working SATA and two IDE) and try the HD out on that one. Outside of that, I don't know what to do.
Intel Core 2 Duo 1.87 GHZ
320 GB Hitachi SATA
P6N SLI-FI MSI Mobo
2 GB Corsair 800 DDR2 RAM
Nvidia 7600 GT
Some background: A while back a friend convinced me to try to install Linux again (last time I had to wipe the hard drive to get Windows back, and I wasn't very eager). It went ok, but the Linux Kernal was corrupted, so we were going to reinstall it. We deleted the partition Linux was on with the intention of reformatting it and trying again. The only problem was that GRUB was still looking for Linux, and wouldn't let me boot into Windows. Eventually I remembered my Admin password and used Windows Recovery to do the "fixmbr" command, and I thought everything was peachy.
It wasn't. Windows started up normally, and asked to do a disk check, so I said yes, like it was supposed to. It was going fine, until the third stage, when it just froze. The HD stopped spinning, and nothing happened for about 5 minutes, so I figured it was frozen, and restarted my computer. Bad idea. Windows tried starting, but something was corrupted in the boot file. It would flash a BSOD at me and restart before I could read the BSOD. After some frustration, I eventually tried to clear the Master Boot Record again in Windows Recovery. The BSOD was gone, but I was getting errors saying the NTLDR file was missing. I copied the NTLDR and the ntloader.com files (or whatever they were, don't remember exactly) from Windows CDs, and I stopped getting those errors. Unfortunately, I'm now where I stated at the beginning of the post.
At this point, I can't even tell if I do something right or not, because all HDs seem to act the same on that computer. My next plan of attack is to find a SATA-compatible computer (I've got three, the non-working SATA and two IDE) and try the HD out on that one. Outside of that, I don't know what to do.
Intel Core 2 Duo 1.87 GHZ
320 GB Hitachi SATA
P6N SLI-FI MSI Mobo
2 GB Corsair 800 DDR2 RAM
Nvidia 7600 GT
