System has failled... help with cause.

[marl]

Hi guys. I was happily surfing the internet, believe it or not I was on Ocuk's homepage, went for a coffee came back and the screen was shimmering. I had no control over K/B and neither ALT+F4 or CTR+ALT+DEL worked. So, I pressed the reset button.

Immediately went to screen with options to restart window normally or in safe mode. I had no control over KB so it tried to restart normally but failled to boot up.

It then went into some sort of repair mode and after about 10 minutes I got a message sayng that windows could not repair itself and that the problem could be down to a recent hardware installation.

I had recently installed a new SSD and had installed windows on it. However, I retained the old HDD with windows on it and when I disconnected the new SSD and reconnected the old HDD the PC still failled to boot up.

I then tried to reinsatll windows on the SSD. Things seemed to be going well until about 30% through the installation it just stopped. I had to restart the PC and then got a message saying BOOTMGR is missing.

I then tried reinstalling windows on a new HDD I was using for storage only
but screen keeps going to BOOTMGR is missing.

I can get into the BIOS and in it the hard drives and RAM are recogised.

At various times I had a pattern of pairs of dots arranged vertically and horizontally across the screen, I also had a display that was a mass of colour like a distorted rainbow.

The PC's MB/RAM/CPU/GPU are about 6 years old - Q6600, Abit IP35pro, corsair RAM and 8800GT GPU.

Any thoughts regarding the fault would be appreciated!!!!

 

[marl]

The SSD was installed over a month ago and has worked daily up until now without any problems!

 

[marl]

I also tried to reinstall windows on a HDD without success!

 

[marl]

Remove both the ssd and hdd, then only insert the one drive you want to install onto. Make sure the PC boots to the windows disc first, this can be changed by going into the BIOS and changing the boot order. The message you are getting is because it is trying to boot from a half finished install of windows.

Make sure you boot from your install disc and have only 1 drive inserted.

*Reason is that windows may dump files on another drive if its inserted, causing issues later down the line.

Thanks... but I tried this without success!

 

[marl]

What happened? - Is the disc loading the setup?

I tried again with only the HDD connected.

PC starts and asks to 'press any key to boot from CD.'

When I do this with installation disc in CD drive it goes to screen with 'start windows normally option highlighted.' At this stage I don't seem over have any control over keyboard.

The PC then counts down and restarts and screen says

'The computer restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error. Windows installation cannot proceed. To install windows 'clicl OK to restart the computer and then restart the installation.'

When I click ok it then says 'setup will continue after restarting.'

It then fails to install and goes back to the 'press any key to boot from CD' option.

I can get into the bios and the HDD is recognised. I have 'SATA ROM' set as first boot disc.

Sledgehammer time perhaps!!!!!!!

 

[marl]

Guys... many thanks for all the suggestions but no luck as yet. I tried memtest but couldn't get CD to run.

I did go into abit MB's bios and came across a failsafe setting. When I choose this option the PC booted into a test mode and memory tested as OK.

I have a usb mouse and Keyboard.

Unfotunately I don't have any other components to swap with. I did take out and inspect the RAM 2x1 GB sticks and 2x2 GB sticks and it looks fine. I did try restarting with only the 2x1 GB sticks fitted without luck.

The only other thing I can think of doing is trying the RAM in all the slots....

 

[marl]

Bugger - could try order a new optical drive - you get free postage now - have you tried a bare bones set up and the Admirals system check link?

You really need a pal with spare PC bits so you can swap in some known working parts.

My money is on the memory or the mb. It is frustrating when they don't work, been there.

Yeah... I was thinking of getting a prebuilt bundle...