It's a strange problem I'm having.

This guy is remoted into his computer last night. it locks up during outlook compose new email. he reboots but the computer never comes back on (so he thinks)

he goes in the next morning and the computer is sitting there with no error, just the black screen with the cursor.

I go over there and start to check shit out.

turns out this computer will not boot without the windows xp sp2 cd in the drive.

without the disc:
black screen with the blinking cursor

with the disc:
"please press any key to boot from CD..."
after that times out and no keys are pressed, windows loads normally.

event logs are clean.
chkdsk says no errors.
bios has been reset to defaults during troubleshooting
cables are tight and in good condition
bios see's the harddrive
windows xp repair sees the harddrive
no errors anywhere
bios boot order is "CD, HDD, FLOPPY, OTHER". changing this has no effect.


wtf, mate? I verified this like 8 times, because it just didn't make a lot of sense to me.

none of this works
http://icrontic.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15399

[Edited on November 4, 2009 at 11:38 AM. Reason : my mind. it is blown]

11/4/2009 11:25:34 AM

done fucked up that MBR son

actually i have no idea

11/4/2009 11:32:23 AM

11/4/2009 11:45:40 AM

I had the same issue. You gotta rewrite your mbr and make absolutely sure your bios settings are right

11/4/2009 3:12:34 PM

You tried logging into recovery console and doing fixboot, fixmbr, chkdsk -r?

11/4/2009 3:21:35 PM

I bet if you put ANY boot CD in there, nevermind the WinXP boot cd, that automatically loads the machine's OS if it times out, it would work.

That being said, what happens if you disconnect the CD drive or pop it out if a laptop?

11/5/2009 12:11:07 AM

exact same thing happened to me, and my computer at work has had that behavior before - I don't think it can start explorer. for whatever reason when that happens it will boot just find if I unplug the network cable while windows starts.

11/9/2009 2:38:22 PM