I cannot boot up.....

[piniongear]

This may not be the place to post this question and if not, perhaps the Moderator could move it where it should go.

I built this computer in April 2009.
It has an AMD 5400 Athon X2 Processor, 2.8GHz Dual Core.
Using a MSI K9N2GM mother board with an Nvidia 9400-GT card.
I have (3) WD750GB Caviar Black hard drives in the case.
I also have a WD1001Caviar Black 1TB hard drive in the case too.

The smaller hard drives have XP, Vista, and Win 7 Evaluation, each on it's separate drive.
The 1TB drive is empty and I have formatted it.
My intent is to install my new Windows 7 Pro on this drive.
I have been running Win 7 Evaluation almost 100% of the time since June this year.

My first effort was done by booting up in what I normally use, ie, Win 7 Evaluation.
I inserted the Win 7 Pro disk and it quickly told me 'Windows encountered an internal error while initalizing COM.' (Whatever COM means?)

My second effort went better. This time I booted up in Vista and inserted the Win 7 Pro disk and it began to install the system. Great!

My problem started when, at a certain point, Win 7 needed to restart. The restart was done automatically, meaning there was no pause on this multi-boot system to allow me to pick Vista as the system to restart.

Instead, it restarted using the default Win 7 Evaluation system. The fonts were very large and fuzzy, like it was running in the safe mode.
I just let it run and finally it told me the install was not successful and that it had to unload everything loaded so far.
Fine, I just let it do it's thing.

I then removed both the XP and the Win 7 Evaluation hard drives and tried to reboot using Vista and the blank hard drives still installed in the case.
Result: After the motherboard logo comes on, the screen should normally give me a black background screen with white lettering showing my different boot options.
But instead, the screen goes solid black with a small blinking white dot in the upper left corner.

I then installed both the XP and Win 7 Evaluation hard drives back in and tried to boot again but have the black screen with white dot.

Can anyone suggest what happened? It appears that I somehow lost my files that enable me to boot up. I am at a complete loss as to what happened.
Thanks guys for any help or comments............ pg

[systempat]

Sounds like it may have deleted or interfered with your boot loader. Which is what gives you the choice of which OS you are booting.

At this point if you want to proceed to install Win7, connect only the drive you want to install it on. On boot-up go to the boot options page, think it's an F12-key then select the CD/DVD drive to boot from the Win7 disk. IT will take it from there. If going the the boot options screen does not work for you, then go into the BIOS and change the boot from order to the CD/DVD drive first. Eventually you will have to change it back, but you have to use the Windows self-booting to get going.

[piniongear]

Systempat........
Thanks for the suggestions. I was trying to get to the boot menu and the BIOS but am unable to get there. F12 and F8 keys only make the computer go 'Dink, Dink' when pressed.
The screen stays black, with the small white rectangle flashing in the upper left corner.

Since the problem occurred after I had removed the hard drives I am beginning to wonder if I perhaps zapped the motherboard? The black screen and lack of response to any keystroke makes me think the MB may be dead.

My next try is going to be removing all 4 memory chips from the slots, remove all hard drives and then let it sit for a while.
I will reinstall only the single blank hard drive and try to get the new Windows Pro 7 to start from the disk. If this does not work, I think I may buy another exact model of the motherboard I have and see if that is the problem.
I have no idea how, or if, a motherboard can be checked.
Thanks again........ pg

[Dark Nova]

Delete to access the BIOS (have to be pressed while you see the mobo logo screen), check the boot order, make sure its set to CD drive before HDD

[systempat]

If you are not getting to the initial BIOS screens, then it does sound like problems. You are not hearing an initial beep and getting any kind of display? Or do you see a splash screen (initial picture that shows while booting - I always turn off so I forget about those)? Does it ever seem to be accessing the drives (you know by indicator lights or sounds or whatever)?
There is nothing in the loading of the Operating System that is dangerous to the hardware that I know of. The only issue that I have hit on this is if multiple drives are installed. The loader on the install may make an arbitrary decision on which drive to install to. It does not seem to see the drive letters that were defined. Which is another reason to temporarily disconnect the other drives.
Are all your HDDs using SATA to connect? OR do you have an IDE drive in there?

If you can't get to the bios screens then the motherboard would have to be considered suspect. First inspect the power connectors to the board. Make sure the big connector (24-pin) looks to be fully seated. Also check the CPU power,which is the 4 or 8-pin connector that plugs in near the CPU. Maybe they've been nudged or jarred loose while working on other things. Good luck on this.

[piniongear]

Originally Posted by systempat If you are not getting to the initial BIOS screens, then it does sound like problems. You are not hearing an initial beep and getting any kind of display? Or do you see a splash screen (initial picture that shows while booting - I always turn off so I forget about those)? Does it ever seem to be accessing the drives (you know by indicator lights or sounds or whatever)? There is nothing in the loading of the Operating System that is dangerous to the hardware that I know of. The only issue that I have hit on this is if multiple drives are installed. The loader on the install may make an arbitrary decision on which drive to install to. It does not seem to see the drive letters that were defined. Which is another reason to temporarily disconnect the other drives. Are all your HDDs using SATA to connect? OR do you have an IDE drive in there? If you can't get to the bios screens then the motherboard would have to be considered suspect. First inspect the power connectors to the board. Make sure the big connector (24-pin) looks to be fully seated. Also check the CPU power,which is the 4 or 8-pin connector that plugs in near the CPU. Maybe they've been nudged or jarred loose while working on other things. Good luck on this.

Systempat.....
Here is where things stand at the moment:
I followed Dark Nova's (Thanks DN)suggestion with the DEL key and was able to get into BIOS. There I found the boot sequence had become scrambled. No doubt from me removing the hard drives and then reinstalling them.
The boot order was set to boot first from the empty hard drive. DUH...... yeah, it's not going to boot from that.
So I changed the boot order to a drive containing one of the (3) OS to boot first, followed by the CD-DVD drive second in line. I am unsure which I picked because I cannot tell one drive from another under BIOS except for the 1TB empty drive being different than the other (3) 750GB drives.

Picked 'Start normally', and the thing boots up. Yeaaa! At least I have my computer back again.

Next I insert the Windows 7 Pro disk and it begins to load.
It restarted several times and seemed to be restarting in Vista all times, as far as I could tell.
The entire process finished.
I had chosen a custom install at the beginning and checked 'put the OS on the empty drive'.


I was asked if I wanted to format the drive, and although I had done so before, I decided to format again, which was done. Now I no longer had a name on this drive that was there before, so the format did something.
Anyway, Win Pro 7 loaded fine and sits on that 1TB empty drive.

There was a loss however. I no longer have the choice (following the motherboard logo) to choose which system I want to boot to. It just automatically opens up Win 7 Pro. So it seems like I need to find out what happened to the multi-boot choice.

Thanks again. I will work with it some more and see if these problems can be worked out....
pg

[StephenLee]

Have you tried these three methods showed in the article?

I think it could help you resolve the issue.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Windows-Xp-Startup-Problems---3-Easy-Ways-to-Fix-Windows-Xp-Startup-Problems&id=3087747

[piniongear]

Originally Posted by StephenLee Have you tried these three methods showed in the article? I think it could help you resolve the issue. http://ezinearticles.com/?Windows-Xp-Startup-Problems---3-Easy-Ways-to-Fix-Windows-Xp-Startup-Problems&id=3087747

Thanks, but I did not try any of those.
I solved the problem several weeks ago by using EasyBCD. This worked wonderfully and with little effort I was able to boot up using either XP, Vista, Win7 Trial, or Win7 Pro.
pg