Computer problems please help!

ae.

Well this kinda pissed me off I went to the mall today and let my older brother play some tf2 on my computer when I came back it asked for my password I put it in but when I pressed enter it froze.

So I held the power cord to turn off the machine when I restarted it took a long time and eventually told me to enter a boot device and restart I found that odd but I can't seem to get around this?

What happened and what do I need to do cause I don't want to reinstall everything

Should I take it into a computer shop?

Help please I had slot of art done and as luck has it the device I saved those on broke and was one of the reasons I went to the mall today.

Mechadus

I am far from the greatest repair guy in the world, but I have encountered this problem before.. When I have had that problem, it was because the hard drive was getting ready to sketch out. Usually if you let the computer sit for a time you can get it into windows, or you can try to reset the cmos via the jumper on your mobo. If you do get it up and running tho, definately back up everything you got incase its about to die for good. Several of my render nodes at work have done that before, and a new (new to that computer) hard drive fixed it every time so far.

Sorry about your luck - sounds like you have an ass whipping to deliver.

-N

fast1

why don't you go to the tech forums and pose your questions there? i think you will get your qns answered

glib

Your best bet is to use another computer or ask a friend to make you a bootable CD and run some tests on the drive. I'd have to agree that a dying HD is the most likely culprit. Are you saying you were keeping a backup of your art on an external drive, but it died on you today too? Unlucky. Well hopefully you bought another drive at the mall today, so if you do manage to boot from cd, you should grab as much data as you can in case the drive decides to go.


On a completely different note, fast1: why are all of your posts followed by a clear gif file?

ae.

Gonna take it to a repair shop tommorow! Really sucks weekend went down the drain:(

Firebert

if worse comes to worse, you can always stick that bastard in the freezer. that won't fix anything that you are experiencing now, but if it gets to the point of the drive itself not booting at all, it may be your last resort. if a drive is overheating due to age, sometimes that is the only way you can get it to boot so you can get your files off of it. you may have to buy a new hd and install everything again, then plug your current one in to access the files. plus, with the cost of drives being relatively low nowadays, it may be a cheaper alternative than taking it to a repair shop. you'll have the added bonus of a clean hd with that new car smell. this is all a worst case scenario of course.

TechSmith

Can you get into the BIOS/setup? If so does it see your hard drive?
Check for removable media (flash drives and such) that it might be trying to boot from.
If you still can't boot into windows try a Linux Live CD http://www.knoppix.net/ and boot from it.
if your drive is there but not booting yuo can recover data and this way.
If you can see your drive with the Knoppix cd then you can always try to fix the MBR of your hard drive . Here's a link to some scary MS instruction http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058
It's easier than they make it sound. Get into recovery console and type fixmbr.
Ok, I'm off to sleep. G'luck

BTW exscuse all typos. I've been doing taxes for 3 hours.

Jeremy Lindstrom

Take out your USB pen drive or USB hard drive.

Pseudo

To echo what others are saying, make sure there isn't a CD in the drive (or a flash drive plugged in).

If your PC is configured to boot CD before HD then it's going to see your brothers Britney Spears CD and not know what to do.

ae.

got my computer back and bought a new external hard drive. time to install everything! lost all my data!

Tumerboy

sucky
backup is great, but be careful relying on an external for it. There was a thread a month or two back about external drives failing. . .

. . . you know, just to make you feel better about it :P

ae.

Tumerboy wrote: »

sucky
backup is great, but be careful relying on an external for it. There was a thread a month or two back about external drives failing. . .

. . . you know, just to make you feel better about it :P

yeah the only thing that sucks is the Big sandwich games art test i have to restart and gotta redo the fish fountain :P

yeah ill probably make a cd/dvd every month for all my new files.