Old computer won’t boot
June 5th, 2014
tried to use hiren’s boot cd, and a windows live cd. but they won’t boot.
Vicki
First off you need to go to Google and copy and paste this text into your search and then download the progie onto your spare PC, and do what one does to get it going: Spotmau PowerSuite Golden
The installed software provides 2 icons on your desktop. Boot suite and Powersuite. Use Bootsuite to create a DVD (the program fills a normal 4.75GB DVD) then reboot the offending PC and let it load that DVD in its CD/DVD Drive and try the various options there to get your hard drive working. Dvd is said to start and fix problems on any pc.
Usually, the hard drive won’t load because its missing the MBR boot and if you are lucky, you can get away with just repairing that. However, as is normally the case, you will have to reinstall your OS. Boot the hard drive and pick the package which provides you with the serial number or your Win7 OS, if you don’t have the original OS (I have win7 Ultimate – an original DVD). Write that serial number down. Now, get out of the program and it will reboot the PC. If you have the original OS, put it into the DVD now and the PC will get you back to the setup of your PC. Choose which you want. 1) use an existing OS. 2) Create a new OS. Go for 2.
The program says it will gather and store your old windows system as Windows.old and it will select for you which partition (C) if your hard drive is partitioned for the new OS to go in. Hit return and follow the instructions just the same as you did when you loaded the Win7 (or any other OS, on a clean hard drive).
You will find Spotmau will reload your Win7 OS as a clean install. When the OS is installed and the PC boots and restarts OK, go into C and locate the yellow folder marked windows.old and delete it from your hard drive in its entirety. This frees up space on your C Drive of around 5GB, without compromising your new Win7 installation (or whatever other OS you instal).
Now, you cannot clone a copy of Win7 onto another hard drive and put that hard drive into another PC because it will be immediately incompatible and won’t boot. You can only use the hard drive you created on the PC on which you created it. That is because each PC has its own unique serial number which is incorporated into the created serial number which you ring Microsoft with and read them over the phone line (and they give you the serial number to put into your PC to unlock the Win7 OS) or the PC will do that for you, if you are online.
Unfortunately, you have to reinstall all of your supporting programs. It pays to go to Start, Control Panel and Systems and Security and follow the links to download immediately, the latest updates from Microsoft.
Once you have reinstalled all of your supporting programs (WINRAR, etc) go to CNET and download SlimDrivers which is a free program and update all of your drivers on your reconstituted hard drive.
Bigbenn
sounds like it might be a bad hard drive
disconnect it and see if you can get a “no boot device” error and be able to get into the bios
edwoodweb replied: sounds like it might be a bad hard drive
disconnect it and see if you can get a "no boot device" error and be able to get into the bios
disconnected the hard drive and still got the hp invent screen with the weird characters on the top left
I just find those characters at the top of the screen odd. I’ve never seen them before this problem.
try resetting the BIOS with the jumper on the motherboard (reset_cmos)
unplugged the cmos for awhile and moved the jumpers over. got it to working for now,
thanks edwoodweb