Boot Problem

[IMC]

Hi.

A friend of mine has asked me to have a look at his Packard Bell EasyNote laptop because he has been having trouble with it. The problem is that when the laptop is turned on a screen with the Packard Bell logo appears with this message below it:

Press F2 to Enter Bios Setup, F8 To Display Boot Order.

If nothing is pressed it will go to the boot order screen where i am able to select from the following:

Hard Disk C
CD-ROM Drive
Diskette A
PXE LAN

Whenever one is selected the screen will just flash on and off again. I have tried changing the boot order in the BIOS also.

Im really puzzled with this one so any help is most appreciated. If you need any more information i can provide you with what i have.

Thanks,
Ian

[tmathews]

Have you tried booting from CD and/or floppy? Have you looked through the BIOS settings to see if they make sense? Is the clock wrong, suggesting a CMOS battery failure? When you select a boot option and the screen flashes, does it just sit there at the boot order screen, or start you over at the Packard Bell logo, or flash repeatedly until you shut it off? Does it behave differently on wall power than on battery?

What happened to the machine before it started showing this behavior? Was it dropped or bumped? An attempt to flash the BIOS? Is the behavior new or did it do this occasionally and now it won't do anything else?

[IMC]

Thanks for the reply.

As far as im aware it hasnt been dropped, bumped or had the BIOS flashed. Its only just started behaving like this a few days ago and was working fine before that i am told.

The clock is an hour behind (possibly due to daylight saving time). When a boot option is selected the screen will go black for a brief second and then return back to the boot option screen. There is no difference between mains and battery power.

As for booting via CD or floppy, what sort of disk would i need.

[tmathews]

Initially, anything bootable will do. If you can't boot from any medium the problem is in the BIOS or motherboard; if you can, you'll be able to run diagnostics. The Windows install or recovery CD would be good, or the Ultimate Boot CD (Google it if you don't have one), or even a DOS floppy.

If there's anything valuable on the hard disk, this would be a good time to slave it to a working machine and try to back it up. This would also demonstrate that the disk works and further isolate the problem. No critical data and/or don't have the adapters to slave it, you can skip this and move on.

Can BIOS see the hard disk? Aside from the clock, does anything else in BIOS look unusual? That the clock is keeping time says the CMOS is probably okay.

Assuming you can boot from CD, the next step would be either to try a repair install of Windows or to run diagnostics. I'll guess you won't be able to do the repair install (please feel free to prove me wrong) so the next step would be diagnostics on the disk and/or motherboard.

[IMC]

I have been able to boot from my Windows XP CD and tried to set it up. On the section which shows the current partition there was no HD listed. Does this signal a problem with the HD.

[glc]

Very likely. Download and make a Ultimate Boot CD, boot with it, and try hard drive diagnostics - if you don't know the brand of the hard drive, the Hitachi/IBM Drive Fitness Test will test any brand.

www.ultimatebootcd.com

[IMC]

Just ran the test as you said and it came back with the following:

WDC ROM MODEL-SCORPIO

Problem detected on a non Hitachi disk drive, please contact you HDD supplier for additional support. Disposition code = 0x71