Hi,

I've been reading around on this forum and there sure are a lot of helpful people here (ok that sounded korny, but you get the point).

I have a bit of a problem with my computer not wanting to boot. I just came back from my christmas break, plugged my computer back into the eletrical socket and whilst booting, it stopped just before the windows startup screen came on, in other words the windows boot up screen never appears. By the way, the reason why I unplugged my computer from the electricity socket is that i used to live in Mexico and there the electricity could spike and potentially fry your computer if you didnt have a UPS. Here (Sweden) my UPS doesnt work, because of the different voltage. I have lived in Sweden for six months and before this, the different voltage hasnt been an issue seeing as I just switched the voltage on my Power Supply before I plugged it in here.
Anyway, my computer had worked well enough before I went for my week long holiday. The only thing unusual about my computer before I left was a habit of randomly shutting off at times. When it happened, it happened like 2 or 3 times, but if I just left my computer off for a while it would stop. The way in which it shut off before is different from now in the way in which it used to let me boot into windows, but now it doesnt.

So far, I have done the following in terms of trouble shooting:
1. I have an old hard drive still in my computer that had a working version of windows. All i had to do before to get it running was switch power cables with my new one, and from there I could boot into my old windows. I tried switching around the power cables, but it did the exact same thing (everything runs just as normal apart from the screen staying blank just before it is supposed to boot into windows at which it freezes and restarts and from there it can repeats)
2. I tried running a live linux cd which i had tried on another computer to check that it worked, it did. On the other computer it did boot, on mine it didnt.
3. I pulled out the power supply of both my hard drives and my second cd drive as to try and minimize power usage to try and boot into the linux live cd. No result.
4. When my computer boots it seems to find all of my ram, but i m not 100% sure if its intact.
5. I tried disconnecting all usb devices on my computer. Again no progress
6. I can still access the bios so maybe that means my motherboard isnt at fault, and neither one of my hard drives are making any funny noises.

My specs:
1.25 GBs of ram
2.4 GHz Pentium 4 processor
Asus P4S533-MX motherboard
eGeForce FX 5500

Two final notes: my dad was installing some christmas lights by my room and then somehow puled the plug on my computer. It was only after then that my computer started the trouble of reseting randomly, but at least it let me boot up properly before. Might have caused this in the long term. Secondly, I havent recently installed any new hardware, unless you count a tiny webcam, but that is disconnected now, and I could boot with it connected several times before i went on holiday.

So anybody any ideas? I'd really appreciate any help with this, I m really at a loss as to what to do. Well, I hope to get a reply soon. So if you could, please try and help. Really appreciate anybody taking the time to read this. Happy 2007eace:

Are you sure that your BIOS is set to boot the CD drive prior to the hard drive?

What version of Windows are you using? Do you have the Windows CD?

Thanks for the help, but I managed to figure out the problem anyway. Turns out there was some problem with my RAM or something, because when I removed one of my two RAM sticks (I don't know if there is a more correct way of referring to RAM).
The idea struck me when I was trying to boot into linux and all that it said was something along the lines of "data tree unable to build" and "kernel panic". It then struck me that the cd of course writes the operating system to the ram in order to function. Lucky guess in the long run one can say, but it worked. Thanks for the idea about checking the BIOS for the boot order, I had forgotten about that one. Anyway, thanks for the help again. I'll use this forum in the future if I ever have trouble again.:wave:

Thanks for the thanks and the update. Glad you got it sorted out!

Let us know if we can help further in the future. :wave: