Windows XP will not boot

[robertwill]

Hi to all,

A friend dropped his POS off today.....
It will not boot into windows. he says it wouldn't do anything and he thought it was the on board video which is possible b'cuz it wouldn't come up on the screen at all. he installed a video card and now it comes up but it stops the boot and gives the.....
The last boot to windows did not complete would you like to boot into safe mode, normally...etc...
No matter what choice you make it just sits there! Even the count down if you don't make any choice stops at 24 secs and hangs.

I did notice that when it starts up it gives the standard single beep but, then a few secs later it gives another single beep!?!

Mobo - SOYO SY-K7VME

Any Ideas what the problem might be?

[N_Jay]

1) pull the hard drive, put in a known good test unit and see if it will load a new copy of XP.

2) Get a new computer, given the age you will quickly put more time into that machine than it is worth.

[whizmo]

The beeps probably mean some hardware failure - if you know the model of the computer, you can probably google the diagnostics for this model.

Since it appears you now have a working video card, I'd boot into the BIOS and see what is going on. If the setup looks Okay, I'd boot off CD and see if you can reinstall Windows.

- Mark

[humanoid]

Bad power supply?

[LChisum]

...or resident power supply too small to support new video card???

Larry

[N_Jay]

I highly doubt the power supply.
Power supplies are usually random restarts or nothing at all.

My first two guesses arr either the MB went, or the CMOS got corrupted.
Next would be the HD.
Any of those three could have trashed the installation.

You have B/PU that is worth well under $25 and probably some memory too old to move to new MB. (How much Memory do you have?)

You can buy a Motherboard, CPU and 2 G of memory for under $40 each.

So for $120 (less if you bargain hunt), you can be up and running instead of fighting with a unknown failure.

[samc]

I don't think it's the power supply as well. I mean it's an old computer and whatever video he installed the computer got passed post so chances are it's fine.

It can be Hd or just a corrupt windows copy. Did you try the windows disk to fix? That actually works more times then not.

Do yourself a favor and burn yourself either
http://www.ubuntu.com/
http://knoppix.com/
Either have a bootable cd that you can check to see if your video, ram cd, floppy drive works or not. Meaning if your comp boots chances are most of the hardware are fine.