Mother Board Dead?

[colituse]

My Notebook: Lenovo 3000 N100
OS: Windows XP
Type: 0689-A6U

Suspected Problem: I think my mother board is bad.

What’s happens:
I start the computer and the first thing to appear is the Lenovo screen.

Then the next screen to pop up is the
NTLDR is missing
Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to restart

So I made a NTLDR boot CD for XP, and I set my BIOS to boot from the CD.I put the CD in and the screen was blank, you can hear the CD starts to run. It continues for a while and then the same message is displayed.

NTLDR is missing
Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to restart

So I restart the computer and then pressed the Lenovo Care button, it brings up a message that say ThinkVantage Technologies and has a loading bar underneath it. The loading bar finishes and the message changes into Please Wait, while still displaying the loading bar. The computer will now stay there with that message “Please Wait” indefinitely.


The hard drive is still working because I put it into a mini external drive that I had, and connected to a different computer to save all my files. So the next thing I tried was, I have a rescue and recovery CD for my computer and I placed it into the CD drive. Started the computer and you hear the CD spinning for a minute with a blank screen and it stops spinning and the “NTLDR is missing” message pops up again.

Then I downloaded a copy of ubuntu Linux 9.10, I placed it into the laptop and started it. The options came up for how to run ubuntu, I choose to run ubuntu without changes to any files on my computer. It then displayed a blinking underscore at the top left hand side of my screen; it stayed this way the entire time. My philosophy with this was if the computer ran ubuntu live then my hard drive or hard drive partition is bad. If it didn’t then it must be my mother board or some other hardware problem. I also switched out my ram to see if this might be the problem with no success. There are no beep codes when I turn the machine on ether.

So should I replace my motherboard? I’m not sure how to tell if a processor has gone bad. Also I haven’t found anyone one with the same problem online, and have taken the laptop to a repair shop. They said they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it.

 

[Dystopia]

I think is the hard drive. I figured as soon as I saw NTDLR is missing. first, reseat the cable, both from the hard drive and the mobo. This has fixed the problem for me. If that will not fix it, try replacing the hard drive first. ALSO do you have two hard drives? If so, test each one seperatly. If none of that works, return the hard drive, and let us know

 

[tdeath101]

definately a hard drive issue, try using that ubuntu cd without the hard drive pluged in or with another hard drive. usually if a motherboard is dead, you will not get that far.

 

[colituse]

Ok first I pulled the hard drive out and tried the ubuntu CD; it gave the same effect as before. I selected “try ubuntu without changes to my computer”. The CD ran for a while with the blinking underscore at the top left of the screen, forever.

I got a XP pro CD and started the computer. It ran the bios setup for windows (blue screen with white txt), and then it gave me the option to format my drive. It finished formatting, and then at the bottom left hand side of the screen it said “starting windows”. It froze on this screen (still in the bios setup) before starting windows.

So since this didn’t work, I took the hard drive out of a laptop running vista to see if it would boot. Turned the computer on and the vista loading screen started, it then froze on this screen before starting windows. I can't try installing XP on this drive because my sister would kill me!

 

[colituse]

I purchased a new hard drive and placed into my laptop. Then I ran the XP install disk and it still froze when it went to start windows.

 

[Dystopia]

Did you build this system yourself? If you did, did you remember to use thermal paste? It seems that the CPU may be overheating.

 

[NCspecV81]

sounds like you borked your bootmgr. Just reinstall it.