A "what's broke" thread

**tibby01** · 02-02-2007, 05:23 PM

car pc has been working great lately, even through this cold weather we've had in md the last couple weeks. today was really the warmest in a while.

so i drive to my classes, jamming out to music. upon completion of said classes i walk back to my car and start it. so here's what happens.

1. screen will boot up. says its reading ide drives, then sends one line of "A"s across the screen and freezes completely.

so i figured i would try to get into bios, so i restart(cntr-alt-dlt does work at this point), and hit delete before it gets a chance to read the drives. whole screen goes blank except for a flashing curser in the top left, cant ctrl-alt-dlt it

im worried this is a costly problem, because it is totally unexpected and i cant think of any reason why it would do this. thanks for anyone who sheds light on this.

specs:

via epia mII10k
opus 120w
100gig samsung 2.5 hd

**2k1Toaster** · 02-02-2007, 05:27 PM

will it boot normally at all if you don't touch it though, or does it freeze at the same spot everytime now?

Will it get through most of POST but freeze on detecting the HD each time?

**tibby01** · 02-02-2007, 05:29 PM

the second one. it gets the logo up and then says reading ide drives and shoots a line of

A-A-A-

or something across the screen and stays frozen, but can be rebooted with keyboard.

its done it 4 times now, everytime i try. waited a solid 10 minutes for it as well, with no results.

**2k1Toaster** · 02-02-2007, 06:02 PM

If you disconnect your HD, and try to boot does it say "No bootable media found"?

I think you just got a fried HD, or at least a corrupt one. Try this and report back. It is obviously not going to boot into XP with the drive disconnected but it will tell us where the boo-boo is.

**tibby01** · 02-02-2007, 06:04 PM

see, i was thinking that, but wouldnt i be able to get into the bios if that were the case?

**2k1Toaster** · 02-02-2007, 06:07 PM

perhaps. It all depends on how your mobo auto detects the stuff that is plugged into it.

If it is POSTing and freezing in the same spot, that tells me it is a hardware issue other than the mobo most of the time.

Some BIOS's wait until the autocheck is done before allowing access so it can list what devices you have, and so you can change the boot order by name instead of port assignemnt. Meaning in boot order you choose "Maxtor 300Gb HD" instead of "IDE0".

**tibby01** · 02-02-2007, 06:12 PM

oh, good to know. ill be sure to give that a try tomorrow.

**tibby01** · 02-03-2007, 02:51 PM

so i got in my car lastnight, with an hour trip in front of me and the carpc unplugged. i do that because it takes extra long to shutoff when its frozen and didnt want it to eat at my battery.

i plugged it in thinking what the hell(didnt want to sit in silence for an hour), and it booted up fine.

no clue...

**senseless228** · 02-04-2007, 02:46 AM

something similar happened to me, and it seemed that the problem was the cable connecting to the HD loosened up a bit, and pushing it in solved the problem...