Computer question - In other words...HELP!!

[cgallery]

Seeing that even the CD boot seems to not work, its possible your memory (RAM) has gone bad. Bad HDD should not stop you from booting from a CD.

A malfunctioning hard drive can hang the bus, which could cause these sorts of problems.

I wonder if Ed would be willing to look inside his machine for bulging caps.

A lot of the symptoms he describes are what we run into every day on everything from desktop computers to network gear.

Here is a web site that gives some brief (albeit not entirely accurate) description of what is going on:

http://www.badcaps.net/

BTW, the mention of preemptively replacing caps is a BAD idea. Like I said, this guy didn't get everything right. And he is trying to sell his service and parts (can be gotten much cheaper elsewhere).

[cgallery]

I believe the BIOS startup option has to be set to boot from CD first.

Right, and on some newer machines (maybe 2005 and beyond) you can press [Esc] (common for HP) or [F12] (common for Dell) or [F8]/[F9] (common for Asus) to get a boot menu in which you can select the CD for booting.

[crokett]

Ed,

First thing I'd do is go into your computer's BIOS setup and see if it recognizes your HDD and/or check what the boot sequence is. If CD is after HDD then you know you have a problem with HDD since Windows is booting from the CD and not the HDD.

You can also download a fully functional Linux bootable CD that will boot a live OS from the CD. Among other things this will tell you if your computer is indeed working - could be something other than an HDD - RAM, etc. You can't do this from Windows XP CD.

At minimum I would get the Linux GParted CD and boot that. It is free and is a GUI partition editor. You aren't going to change anything, you are only going to see if it can see your HDD and if so, what partitions are there. If you can get your hands on an old DOS boot disk with fdisk this will tell you the same thing.

[radhak]

Both excellent suggestions from David - use the BIOS setup to see if the HDD is recognized, then use a bootable Linux CD to get into the machine. Both non-intrusive (does not change anything on your machine), and simple.