Tech Question

[selena]

I've got a problem. Not sure when it really happened, as I don't do a hard boot very often.

But I did this week, to discover that I can't load windows from my drive. It will load from cd.

I've ran a bunch of spyware, hijack, virus stuff, and find nothing.

Any suggestions?

[High Plains Drifter]

There's a lot of different things that could be wrong - can it boot in safe mode? Does it say "OS not found" after the bios screen? Is the harddrive on fire?

[selena]

No harddrive fire.

I don't have the option of being able to get in safe mode.

Without the CD in, I have nothing but a black screen and a flashing cursor.

I was going to try to start in safe mode, and run all the virus/spy apps then.

[directfiesta]

MBR is probably corrupt.

fix/mbr

[selena]

Okay, I went through the boot process again so I was speaking with a fresh memory.

Without the CD in, I have a blank screen with a flashing cursor. It will not take DOS prompts.

With the CD in, a prompt of "Press any key to boot from CD" appears. If I do nothing, it will go on into windows.

I have tried to do a windows repair. It tells me that the admin password is invalid. Same thing if I try to do an automated system recovery. I don't even really know what that last option means, but I was going to try it.

I am unable to f8 into safe mode.

I don't know what MBR is, but I will look it up after I get the munchkin in bed later tonight. Thanks much for that suggestion.