Build Failure.... help?

[Erasmus354]

Ok well I got all my parts today, everything booted into the bios fine, and I started formatting the drive to install windows.

When I got back from eating dinner to see if the formatting had finished I was greeted by a lovely BSOD, mentioning something about a page file error or something. I rebooted the system and it loaded into the windows setup just fine, I walked away for about 10 minutes and come back to a similar error screen.

Now once the system goes through the boot up screen it goes black and I get nothing. I tried booting from the windows CD to see if I could reformat the drive again, but I still get black.

What should I do? I think that I need to reformat the drive but I dont know how to do that w/o windows installed. Or perhaps could my HD or windows disk be bad?

 

[Arkalius]

It's possible the HDD is bad I suppose...

What you should do is if you can get access to another computer with internet access, download whatever drive utility the manufacturer of your drive puts out, and use that to scan the drive and see if it's ok. You may want to reset the drive's MBR and partition table if you can (assuming the drive isn't bad).

If the drive is fine, just try reloading windows onto it again I suppose. If the problem persists, it could be a number of other things. The IO controller for the drive might be faulty (which is probably integrated on your mainboard, which means the board itself is faulty), it could be a faulty windows install CD, or any number of other things, such as RAM having problems. It's most likely a problem with the HDD itself, but I've learned never to discount anything when trying to troubleshoot hardware problems.

 

[-zax-]

The hard drive would be a good place to start. If you have access to another drive just for testing, throw it in and see if you can get it to format and install Windows. That will help rule out that problem. As Arkalius stated in the previous post, try downloading a hard drive checking utility from your hard drive's manufacturer.

Download and run Memtest86 to rule out any memory issues.

Also check and make sure that your PSU is pumping out enough juice to your components. I wouldn't think it would be the power supply from what you have described, but you can't throw it out as a non-possibility.

At that point, if nothing turns up yet, could be a IDE/SATA hard drive controller issue depending on which type of HDD you've installed. If you've got one, you can throw in a PCI controller card and try booting the PC from that ....

 

[Erasmus354]

Well I downloaded the HD checker utility and have tried to boot from the CD with the checker on it, as well as stealing a FDD from an older computer, and trying to boot from the floppy. Both times I am simply getting a blank screen, zip zada nothing fin. This scares me as it should be able to boot from something other than the HD

I am going to get out my external HD and erase all the data on it, since it doesn't seem like there is anything I can do to test this HD if I cant boot from a CD or FDD would this mean a mobo problem? The BIOS works just fine....

What would be the quickest way to get my external harddrive ready to be used to test and rule out the HD as the bad point?

 

[Arkalius]

I assume you're properly setting the boot priority in the BIOS so that it isn't trying to boot from the HDD first right?

 

[Buckus]

Page file errors are pretty much memory problems. If you can get it to boot up again, I'd run a memory check.

 

[Erasmus354]

I assume you're properly setting the boot priority in the BIOS so that it isn't trying to boot from the HDD first right?

yep, i even went as far as to take the HDD out of the boot sequence all together.

I finished reformatting my old external HD (internal in an external enclosure), and I am going to steal some DDR from my family computer and use those to try and get it running. But that will have to wait until after work.


Hmm, if the RAM is faulty perhaps newegg will give me store credit instead of new sticks, then I could get some OCZ VX.