I'm having a computer issue and got no clue what it is. My power went out, when it came back on my computer would go to the XP splash screen then black. I thought I lost my video card drivers, so I put in a generic video card and the same issue occurs. I tried going into last known config and safemode and the same issue occured. If I leave it at the black screen for 1-2 hours it finally brings up my desktop background, but thats it. I put in my XP disk to reinstall windows and it took about an hour to get to the screen where you can select to install windows or repair, so it doesent seem to be a software issue. I'm thinking its my power supply, CPU, or Motherboard.

3/28/2006 11:22:07 AM

BOOT INTO SAFE MODE, RUN REGEDIT, AND DELETE ANY KEY WITH "ERROR" IN IT

3/28/2006 11:26:16 AM

It wont go into safe mode. The screen goes black.

3/28/2006 11:30:00 AM

I tried both PCI and AGP video cards.

3/28/2006 11:31:09 AM

does your bios have a drive checker? can you get a disk checker on a cd and run it?

3/28/2006 11:39:51 AM

Hmmm, good idea...I'll actually pop in my old hard drive tonight and see what happens. I just put in a 300 gig hard drive a month ago.

3/28/2006 11:42:21 AM

that is the #1 problem I see (i work at a computer/networking shop) when it boots but super slowly.

#2 is something in the load. but normally you can get to safe mode fine if it will eventually load normally.

3/28/2006 11:45:01 AM

also, take everything out of it you can.

pci cards, video cards, add on's, ram, etc.

reduce it to the minimum to run.

3/28/2006 11:45:44 AM

Thanks, I'll try that out tonight

3/28/2006 11:48:20 AM

So, I swapped out the HDD with a known working drive and it worked like a champ. Put the other back in and it took a very long time, but finally booted into windows and now its working. I ran checkdisk on it and it locked up. Think I might have a bad HDD. Its 4 months old, I hope TigerDirect will swap it out.

3/29/2006 11:26:18 AM

thats sorta what i think too.

DL this http://www.passmark.com/ftp/diskcheckup.zip and just run the diskcheckup.exe application. If you have more than one HDD, select it from the dropdown menu, then click "Get Info"
It reads and displays the "SMART monitoring" information stored on a LOT of drives by default. (maybe all nowadays i dunno)

You want to look for Things like
Raw Read Error Rate
SeeK Error Rate
Spin Retry Count
Calibration retry count

Different drives sometimes have varying descriptions, so Basicly anything with "error" or "retry" ect.. you get the picture

From my experience:
If the values for those are anything other than "0", your drive has had problems.

If those values get larger with each restart, the drive is dying.

3/29/2006 12:19:51 PM