PC not starting up

chakotha

Any ideas on this one?

PC (Dell) keeps booting into the black Safe Mode prompt screen after showing the Dell logo for a short while. What ever is then selected results in the Windows XP loading screen showing for a second, then it goes back to the Dell logo for several minutes.

Finally there appears a black screen with the words

Invalid Boot Diskette
Insert BOOT diskette into A:

Any ideas? TIA.

Odaise Gaelach

You could try repairing the master boot record. Start the computer into the Recovery Console and use the fixmbr command.

Windows XP - To start the computer and use the Recovery Console
Fixmbr

hearny

When the machine starts and the dell logo goes are you presented with a list like

Safe Mode
Safe Mode with Networking
etc.

if you are is there an option to disable automatic restart on system failure.

If there is select this option leave it start in normal mode and see if you get an error (make note of it and post it here).

Could be a problem with the hard drive, what model number dell do you have.

You could try starting in recovery console as previous poster suggests and run the command

chkdsk /r

chakotha

Thanks for replies. We are trying to locate our XP disk.

The screen we got to was the one offering

Safe Mode
Safe Mode with Networking etc

but there was no option to disable automatic restart on system failure.

On trying to start again several times, we let the Safe Mode option screen countdown and Windows started booting up and it looked like it was going to be successful as the XP loading screen was there for quite a while, but unfortunately it cut out and tried to reboot again, once again finishing up on the screen showing

Invalid Boot Diskette
Insert BOOT diskette into A:

Now when I try to boot the computer it goes straight from the Dell logo to a black screen showing the message

Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.
Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.
Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information.

Will try to start into Recovery Console.

hearny

Can you go into the bios settings (press F2 or Del when the dell logo is onscreen), is there an option to disable AHCI anywhere in there, if you post the model number I can try to find out where it might be.

You could also try hooking the hard drive up to another computer to run the chkdsk command if recovery console is not working out for you.

chakotha

I got onto the usual Safe Mode menu page by pressing F8 and was allowed to disable automatic restart on system failure.

The error message I then got was

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt.
<Windows root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

I used my XP disk to go into Recovery mode and tried to recover the ntoskrnl.exe with commands such as

expand d:\i386\ntoskrnl.ex_ c:\windows\system32
copy d:\i386\ntoskrnl.ex_ c:\windows\system32

but both result in a response saying

The file could not be copied.

@Odaise Gaelach I also tried fixmbr but got

The old master boot record cannot be read

Any ideas what to try next? Thanks.

hearny

When you booted into recovery console did it five you options as to which windows installation to log onto.

what letter do you get to the left of the cursor, if its not C: type C: and see will it switch.

If it is C: or if it changes to C: type dir and press enter, does it give you a list of files or does it give an error.

Type the command
chkdsk /r
and press enter.

Did you check the bios settings for AHCI.

chakotha

hearny wrote: »

When you booted into recovery console did it five you options as to which windows installation to log onto.

what letter do you get to the left of the cursor, if its not C: type C: and see will it switch.

If it is C: or if it changes to C: type dir and press enter, does it give you a list of files or does it give an error.

Type the command
chkdsk /r
and press enter.

Did you check the bios settings for AHCI.

I ran chkdsk /r and got, among the usual looking output

The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems

I do not see any AHCI settings in the BIOS. The Dell model is Dimension L800r.

The HD is an IDE Maxtor 32049H2