Hardware Analysis - Comp will not boot up

Re: Comp will not boot up

john albrich — 2008-04-27T22:33:44-05:00

The odds are that it was a software or system failure...not an HD failure. Not ruling it out, but it's less likely. For example, a system lock-up that forces a re-boot can easily cause data corruption or data loss.

Regardless, develop and consistently use a good backup protocol so no matter whether it's a disk, software, or system failure, your data will be backed-up.

I prefer the previously mentioned freeware DriveImageXML for standard backups. It's fast, easy, and reliable.

Re: Comp will not boot up

Bob Gray — 2008-04-27T02:01:18-05:00

I plugged it up to another comp as slave, and recovered all my stuff, it did a checkdisk, and deleted some files, it now works fine.
Do I need to ask WD to give me a new HD, and/or should I reformat?
Thanks!

Re: Comp will not boot up

john albrich — 2008-04-26T23:40:35-05:00

Since your data are important to you, and apparently not yet backed-up, the very first thing you should do is backup your disk and/or data. Some freeware ways to do this are:

1) attach your disk to another system as a slave disk, and back it up using a clone utility like freeware xxclone, or a partition/logical disk backup program like freeware DriveImageXML.

DriveImageXML
http://majorgeeks.com/DriveImage_XML_d4919.html
http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm

XXclone
http://www.majorgeeks.com/XXCLONE_d5534.html
http://www.xxclone.com/index.htm
http://www.xxclone.com/idwnload.htm

2) boot your system using a self-bootable medium that contains a backup program and backup your disk and/or data to another medium (e.g. a disk). Some resources like UltimateBootCD can do this.
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Personally, I prefer using XXclone.

Using a cloning utility generally means you have to have another hard disk on which to make the bootable clone copy. A backup utility often simply allows you to back your disk/partition up to a folder or files on another disk...as long as you have sufficient space.

The advantage of using a cloning program like xxclone, is that you can make a bootable copy of your current disk and then debug the problem using the clone disk instead of your original disk.

The idea is to make sure you can always get back to the current base-state in case your debugging efforts make things worse. If you screw-up the cloned copy, you can always create another clone from the original disk and try again.

Once you have backed-up your disk and/or data, get back to us.

Comp will not boot up

Bob Gray — 2008-04-26T23:11:21-05:00

I'm not sure what info you need, so if I dont tell you enough ask away.
If you need links to my stuff on newegg, ask and I'll provide them.

This is a custom built computer, Western Digital is the HD man.

I'm running windows XP Pro.
When my computer boots up it'll say windows did not start successfully. A recent hardware or software change might have caused this ect.

I've tried booting in all 3 safe modes, last known good config, and start windows normally, at the end of it, I see a BSOD for a split second, and it keeps cycleing. I can't see what it says.

Reformatting is not really an option at this time, because I have some stuff on here I need to get off.