Win 2000 machine won't boot

M

meatycheesyboy

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 29, 2004
Messages
482
I redently did a fresh install of win 2000 onto a machine and it worked great for a day. Later I turned the machine on and it wouldn't boot into 2000. It goes through the post, then the screen turns black with nothing on it but a white blinking cursor at the very top. This blinks a few times then moves down one line then disappears, then nothing.

I booted from cd and tried a repar installation but the setup told me that it couldn't find any instances of Win 2000 installed. So I retstarted and went to repair again, this time using the repair console so that I could look at the contents of the hard drive and everything is there, Win 2000 and all.

Has anyone ever seen this and know of a fix?

P4M800PRO-M2(V1.0)
Pentium D 915
2GB PQI PC3200
74 GB Raptor
Geforce MX 440

Everything stock, no overclocking.
 
You have a blinking cursor because the PC can't find the boot sector on the hard drive. See if the hard drive is listed in the BIOS. You will need to fix teh MBR by doing fdisk /mbr booting off a WIN98 boot disk. If it does, try to reinstall it.
 
Since you can get into the recovery console try using the "fixmbr" and "fixboot C:" cpmmands built into the console. If that doesn't work then you may have to reinstall.
 
What sorts of things would damage the MBR? I have no problem reinstalling, I just don't want to find out that the same thing happened again tomorrow because of something I may be doing.

Oh, yes, the hard drive shows in the BIOS no problem. I don't have a WIN98 boot disk unfortunately so it looks like fresh install, here I come!

*edit* Just saw ryan_975's post, thanks, I'll try it and report back *edit*
 
Arkanian said:
You have a blinking cursor because the PC can't find the boot sector on the hard drive. See if the hard drive is listed in the BIOS. You will need to fix teh MBR by doing fdisk /mbr booting off a WIN98 boot disk. If it does, try to reinstall it.
Click to expand...

Blinking cursor means that the system is looking for a boot loader to hand off to. If it doesn't find one then it issues a "Missing Operating System", "DISK BOOT FAILURE", or a similar message. But since the screen goes blank it means that the boot loader was found and loaded, but for some reason it hangs trying ot execute the boot loader's instructions.
 
ryan_975 said:
Blinking cursor means that the system is looking for a boot loader to hand off to. If it doesn't find one then it issues a "Missing Operating System", "DISK BOOT FAILURE", or a similar message. But since the screen goes blank it means that the boot loader was found and loaded, but for some reason it hangs trying ot execute the boot loader's instructions.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the explanation
 
Alrighty, I just tried the fixrmb and the fixboot C:, no luck. But it did do something slightly different, it posts, goes to the screen with the blinking cursor, the blinking cursor moves down 2 lines then it hangs.

So, it looks like I am on the road to a fresh install. Now I just need to know if it was anything I did to mess up the MBR so I can avoid doing it again.
 
meatycheesyboy said:
Alrighty, I just tried the fixrmb and the fixboot C:, no luck. But it did do something slightly different, it posts, goes to the screen with the blinking cursor, the blinking cursor moves down 2 lines then it hangs.

So, it looks like I am on the road to a fresh install. Now I just need to know if it was anything I did to mess up the MBR so I can avoid doing it again.
Click to expand...
Either the OS corrupted the MBR or your hard drive is bad. Maybe bad sectors who knows, you might want to run this after the install. Open a command prompt and type chkdsk C: /f
 
definately sounds like a dying drive. How long did you wait until you gave up on the hung screen? I had a dying drive (that would pass the chkdsk test by the way) that would seem to hang right before the boot loader, but if I waited a couple minutes the progress bar before the boot screen would pop up and slowly advance. After that finished (30 seconds or so) the XP boot logo would appear. Then in about 10 minutes I'd have a booted system.

Turned out to be a disk media failure. Some sectors were getting very hard to read and the disk would endlessly try to read it until it figure out what was on the sector.
 
I've only been giving it 15-30 seconds.

That's really disappointing if it is a failing drive. It's only 3 days old. I'll give it longer and see if it loads. But it sounds like I may be in for an exchange.
 
Oh one more question for the two of you since you've been so helpful. When I originally installed the drive the bios detected it incorrectly as a 274 GB drive instead of a 74 GB drive. I then updated the bios and it detected it correctly but could the incorrect detection originally somehow have damaged it?
 
meatycheesyboy said:
Oh one more question for the two of you since you've been so helpful. When I originally installed the drive the bios detected it incorrectly as a 274 GB drive instead of a 74 GB drive. I then updated the bios and it detected it correctly but could the incorrect detection originally somehow have damaged it?
Click to expand...

That shouldn't have anything to do with the issues that you are having. Did you update the BIOS before you installed Windows? Either way, it shouldn't have had any effects on the issues that you are having.
 
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