PC = Dead, help me with post mortem.

nichorob · 11 Mar 2006 at 15:12

So there I was playing WoW last night and all of a sudden things starting to get very jerky as in the screen would freeze for 5 seconds then go back to normal for 5 seconds and so on. I did a hard reboot thinking that it would solve the problem but no, runs through the BIOS just as it would normally start to load Windows but instead comes up with an error: 'Cannot find file NTLDR - please press ctrl-alt-del to restart', and the same thing would happen a couple of times, until i turned it on this morning. And there was nothing, no BIOS screen, TFT didnt come out of standby. no beep to say its passed the system tests, just the fans whirring and thats it.

Can anyone make head or tail of what the hell went wrong here? Ive had some problems in the past similar to this which were down to my SATA cables but the problem was solved after a change of cable. Now this, compleltly out of the blue. Whats most likely to be at fault?

Thanks in advance.

mc_bob · 11 Mar 2006 at 15:31

Personally Id put this down to the mobo.
I had this problem on a socket A rig, after a couple of weeks of it not working I decided to flog all the parts as faulty or untested. All the buyers replied and said all the parts work, very strange.
My bet is the Mobo.

MC_Bob

trojan698 · 11 Mar 2006 at 18:56

Try an ATX reset (turning off the PSU then press the power button), failing that clear the cmos, if those dont work, try reseating everything..

What specs btw?

DeathByMonkey · 11 Mar 2006 at 21:42

I've had a fair few PCs do random things like this to me. Almost every time they work when you remove the mobo from the case (assuming the mobo isnt broken itself of course - but this should allow you to find out). I don't know the techy things that are going on, other than something must be shorting out via the mounting screws on the case - however this doesn't explain why it would work for ages and ages and then suddenly one day decide it wants to have a paddy. Hardware can be tempramental and have a mind of its own sometimes

Not saying it'll work but its worth a try.

DeathByMonkey

acharris · 12 Mar 2006 at 23:37

Hi, the 'Cannot find file NTLDR - please press ctrl-alt-del to restart' is saying that the it cannot find the boot sector on the hard drive, meaning that the hard drive is either faulty or the windows installation has become corrupt and needs to be reformatted and reinstalled.

Try a different HD in the machine if you can get it to boot back up and try it. Also try a different GFX card as the card could have gone faulty and that could have caused the problem in the game and no why it is not booting up anymore. Also check the RAM by changing sticks or running on one stick of RAM.

Anthony

mc_bob · 13 Mar 2006 at 08:02

acharris said:
Hi, the 'Cannot find file NTLDR - please press ctrl-alt-del to restart' is saying that the it cannot find the boot sector on the hard drive, meaning that the hard drive is either faulty or the windows installation has become corrupt and needs to be reformatted and reinstalled.

Try a different HD in the machine if you can get it to boot back up and try it. Also try a different GFX card as the card could have gone faulty and that could have caused the problem in the game and no why it is not booting up anymore. Also check the RAM by changing sticks or running on one stick of RAM.

Anthony

This is true but for me when this happens it was a faulty mobo.
Try a repair on the OS.

MC_Bob