Can't work this out at all

joebingo

joebingo

joebingo

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Joined
9 May 2011
Posts
169
Location
London
Hi Guys,

My PC has been giving me all kinds of problems this morning. I left it on downloading a steam game last night and it rebooted itself during the night, so I get to it this morning and find the "BOOTMGR Missing, press ctrl-alt-del" message greeting me.

I rebooted and loaded up windows fine, but the system hung while loading my startup programs, explorer was responsive to keyboard input but not mouse input. Hard reset and get the same thing happen again, except that mouse input was recognised and no keyboard :confused: Reset agaiin and during the windows boot logo my drive sounds like it's spinning up and failing - no clicking though so doesn't sound like a failed drive.

Reboot the system, and during POST, one of my cores has relocked itself and my OC profile has been reset and my SATA hard disks are not being recognised by the BIOS. For some reason, it's seeing my SATA DVD drives, and occasionally sees the HDDs, but will consistently display the BOOTMGR message.

I've reset the BIOS to original settings to no avail, I've removed the CMOS battery to no avail so it must be faulty hardware somewhere else.

Anyway, my hardware:
Asus m4a87td/USB3
AMD Phenom II x2 545
Radeon 5770
12GB Kingston HyperX RAM
2xdvd drives
2xSATA HDDs
1xIDE HDD
Creative Audigy 2 ZS
500w white box PSU

Now, my gut is telling me it's a PSU issue, but I wanted to see if any of you had any ideas before I plonk cash down on a decent one - money's tight at the moment. It's also 1 more hurdle between me and my CPU upgrade.

Thanks in advance.
 
bootmgr stuff is usually fixed using the Win 7 dvd and doing a repair.

To me, it looks like it either lost power, or went screwy when entering idle mode. Or just bad luck, some component failed. It often happens when you're not looking :)
 
My initial thought was try and do a repair from the Win 7 DVD, but as soon as the SATA disks stopped posting, i decided that wasn't my issue - might have to fix that after getting the drives to POST again!
 
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Probably a long shot, but if you get sporadic crashes/bad boots/BSODs etc, you may wish to try reseating your CPU. I toiled for months trying to work out what was wrong with my PC and a reseat fixed evey issue I had. Obviously that's just me, but if you run out of ideas...
 
If it's the mobo, it's gonna be a pain to pin point.

Memory can be tested one stick at a time. Then if it's flaky, one ram slot at a time, just to be sure it's not the memory controller.

PSUs would go bad under load, but can be erratic. It's easier to swap them out though. Otherwise, could be a HDD failing, optical, ... You can disable them one by one easy enough (except the OS drive).

BIOS reset always the first and easiest option.
 
Well, having checked and reseated everything on the motherboard, and that not helping, I decided to try booting disconnecting random things. Disconnected my XP drive and it loaded up straight away and seems to be stable, so it looks like my PSU has lost some power somewhere along the line :mad:

At least it's working for now, but will have to sort this out before too long
 
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