urgent Boot Failure: System Halted

[dusty550]

Just recentally a computer in my house when I went to boot it up it said Boot Failure: System Halted. I dont get it, it was working fine this morning. Eventually after a few resets it showed the xp loading, took forever then it just went to a blank screen. The systems hard drives are setup like this incase you need to know

|-Master-|
-C: Drive Data
-E: Windows XP Pro
|-Slave-|
-D: Data


If its a problem with the boot manager how would i fix it/reinstall the boot manager but not harm any xp files. IF its ABSOULTLY nessacary I would format the E: drive since it is a seprate partition just for XP but I really dont want to do that if its possible.

[tsehou]

You can try booting up the computer with the windows XP CD and go into recovery console. There you can use the FixMBR command.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx

[Ken_ver_1_5]

could also be a problem with the drive.
You should run the diagnostic to be sure.

[dusty550]

Thanks Ill try both later i never knew that their was a fix boot manager on the XP disc, the only Windows installation disc i knew had that was Vista Beta 1.


Ok A HUGE PROBLEM... I just put in my XP Pro Sp2 disc (which was the same disc used to install it awhile ago) And it tried to load the Disc and it just showed a grey background with 0's all over it. I took out the disc and it had some dirt on it, So i cleaned it with a brush designed to clean CD's. Put it in and when it booted it, it just showed a Blank screen... The last time Ive know this disc worked was about a month ago, when i installed XP Pro on a machine and it worked flawlessly and I havent used it since. The computer has a Floppy drive in it, but it was disconnected because it stopped working about 9 months ago, It just kept the little green light on and wouldnt load anything.

[eyetee]

Check all IDE cables are nice and tight.
Go into BIOS setup and run the Auto detect for the IDE drives.
If you have more than one stick of RAM, try them one at a time.
And finally, as Ken said, it could be a problem with the drive.

[dusty550]

All the IDE drives are detected just fine in the bios. The computer will sometimes boot just fine into Safemode, Can i run fixMBR and chkdsk e: /f in safemode to fix problems?

[dusty550]

I think its a problem with the motherboard... its an Intel Motherboard, about maybe 1-2 years old, its been replaced in the past for frying... The reason i think its the Motherboard is the bios settings are completely unaccessable, Ive tried all keys F keys and ESC, and DEL. F1 was supposed to work but it just practically ignored the keyboard, but the keyboard works fine, its even properally connected (Num Lock turns on)

[Nemesis_911]

When you mentioned the grey screen I thought back to my problems with my P4P800 and wondered if you had the same motherboard. I eventually had my board replaced under warranty but suggest you check the other items mentioned before going that route. After about 40 hours or so with the new board and power supply I started have ram problems and ended up trashing my 2 sticks of "XR" PC3200 512 mb DDR.
The audio messages with P4P800 are probably similar to the beeps but wonder if you heared anything when it was trying to boot.