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Black screen with "Reboot and Select proper Boot device.....

G

Gail

Flightless Bird
Help, please!

I turned on my computer and got a black screen with the message: “Reboot
and Select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device
and press a keyâ€

I had no prior warning or problems with my computer.

I hit F1 for the setup menu and there is no hard drive listed under channel
devices on the main Tab! It says [None] for First and Second Channel Device
0 and 1. The CD and DVD drives are listed under Channel Device 0 and 1. For
Installed Memory it says “1024 MB/PC2-3200 and Memory Bank 0 and 2 show 512
MB/DDR2 SDRAM. Core Version says 08.00.10 and BIOS Revision says 3.18
2/16/05.

Under Advanced tab, it lists CPU type as Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.00GHz with HT
Technology and it lists the CPU Speed and Cache RAM.

If I go to advanced under Boot Device Priority, hard drive group is listed
but has parentheses around it. To the right, it says that means the device
has been disabled in the corresponding type menu, but I don’t see it anywhere
as disabled.

I bought this tower several months ago used and it has no warranty. There
was no boot cd with it.

The really scary thing is that I cannot get into safe mode or system
recovery. It just goes back to the black screen with the message when I
press F8 or F10!

Can anyone help with any suggestions other than buying another hard drive?
I am on Social Security and it was a real hardship to buy the last one. It
is a HP Paviliona1023c. I have Windows XP Home SP3.

I will probably have to call a tech to come and look at it, but I thought I
would try you guys first.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Gail
 
P

Paul

Flightless Bird
Gail wrote:
> Help, please!
>
> I turned on my computer and got a black screen with the message: “Reboot
> and Select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device
> and press a keyâ€
>
> I had no prior warning or problems with my computer.
>
> I hit F1 for the setup menu and there is no hard drive listed under channel
> devices on the main Tab! It says [None] for First and Second Channel Device
> 0 and 1. The CD and DVD drives are listed under Channel Device 0 and 1. For
> Installed Memory it says “1024 MB/PC2-3200 and Memory Bank 0 and 2 show 512
> MB/DDR2 SDRAM. Core Version says 08.00.10 and BIOS Revision says 3.18
> 2/16/05.
>
> Under Advanced tab, it lists CPU type as Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.00GHz with HT
> Technology and it lists the CPU Speed and Cache RAM.
>
> If I go to advanced under Boot Device Priority, hard drive group is listed
> but has parentheses around it. To the right, it says that means the device
> has been disabled in the corresponding type menu, but I don’t see it anywhere
> as disabled.
>
> I bought this tower several months ago used and it has no warranty. There
> was no boot cd with it.
>
> The really scary thing is that I cannot get into safe mode or system
> recovery. It just goes back to the black screen with the message when I
> press F8 or F10!
>
> Can anyone help with any suggestions other than buying another hard drive?
> I am on Social Security and it was a real hardship to buy the last one. It
> is a HP Paviliona1023c. I have Windows XP Home SP3.
>
> I will probably have to call a tech to come and look at it, but I thought I
> would try you guys first.
>
> Thanks for any suggestions.
>
> Gail
>


Looks like it had a 250GB SATA in it.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...9858&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

To give you some chance of getting yourself out of this mess, you'd want:

1) The install media from HP. This should be available for at least
as long as that model had warranty support time left on it. There
may be a charge for the media. (HP will list it as an available part
in their Part Store, until such time as they're not offering warranty
service on that model, and then you may have to look elsewhere for
a source for the media.)

The HP Part Store doesn't show that as a stock item for the a1023c.
Which means it may be too late to get it from HP. This page is
from the HP Part Store.

(Go here, enter Pavilion a1023c where it says "Product Number of Name",
on the next page, you get to choose the sub-model, either PW710AAR or PW710AA.
Then click "List all parts" link, to get a list of replacement parts.)

http://h20141.www2.hp.com/Hpparts/Default.aspx

You can try contacting HP, to see if that item is available or not. This is
one of their contact pages. I don't know what options they have, if
the part is no longer listed in HP Parts.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/contacthp?lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&os=228&product=466264&sw_lang=

Part number is 5070-0329 = "Recovery CD - (52NAheBLU1) and Supplement #1"

http://h20141.www2.hp.com/Hpparts/p...4840AD2DAA84E1F27C04&SearchCriteria=5070-0329

Example of a reseller of some sort, offering that package for $45. I
have no idea, which of the resellers is legit. (And resellerratings.com
has no entry for that example company.) The HP Part store has a link
you can click, next to the 5070-0329 item, for a list of resellers.

http://myrecoverycds.com/HPa1000.html

2) A new hard drive. This 250GB is $45 plus shipping. I like to buy
drives locally, from a retailer I trust. So far, I've had zero failures
from that retailer, which tells you the drives aren't being bounced
around a lot before I get them. One problem with Newegg, is how some
of the drives are being packaged. My retailer may not be able to match
the price exactly, but comes pretty close ($48.15 and no shipping as it's
local).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148451

This job would have been a lot easier, if you'd spent the $45 on
a second hard drive up front, and made backups. You can get
software from the disk manufacturer web site, to transfer data
from one drive to the other, and by doing so, you'd have had
a copy of the software for which you had no recovery CDs. Depending
on how it works out, sourcing the recovery media, this could end up
being twice as expensive.

*******

That's a worst case estimate of what it'll take to get it fixed.

The thing is, if the hard drive is not showing in the BIOS, the drive
may not be starting up. A PC hard drive will not respond to a probe
by the computer, if it cannot "become ready". To become ready, the
spindle has to spin up, the head assembly has to slide down the
loading ramp and move over the surface of the platter. The controller
has to be able to read some information "below sector 0", which contains
key information for getting at your data. If the controller cannot
read that information, which might include firmware, bad block or
sector sparing information or the like, then the controller will refuse to
listen to any commands on the SATA cable.

You might get lucky. If you open the tower and have a look,
perhaps one of the two cables on the SATA drive has come loose.
That was a problem with early SATA drives and their cables. Eventually,
the turkeys who designed the cables, figured out they needed a
retention feature, and now the cables grip a bit better. So
more modern systems, won't be quite as prone to having the
cables fall off. (With the older ribbon cable drives, it was
a bit more difficult for the cable to disconnect unintentionally.)

(Picture of SATA power and SATA data cables, for your 250GB drive.
These are the cables you'd be checking. Sometimes the connectors
are right angle type, to give them a low profile so they don't
bump into other hardware.)

http://i164.photobucket.com/albums/u7/RHochstenbach/HDD/sata_drive-1.gif

If you can't see the hard drive in the BIOS screen, it's going to be pretty
hard to use any kind of software to work on it. Getting it
recognized in the BIOS, is a critical step.

If you examine the existing hard drive, and look at the label,
you can get a part number. You can Google the part number and
look for comments about that particular model. Sometimes, you
can learn things, such as common failure modes, and in some
cases, there are actually procedures that can be used to
recover the drive. Not all hard drive failures involve
them being physically ruined - sometimes it's a corrupt
data structure or the like, and the mechanical parts
are all fine. But the odds of this being the case, are
pretty slim. About as slim as the "put the hard drive
in the refrigerator" trick working. You can save that
trick, for when you've tried everything else, and have
given up on ever using your data again.

If you want a still cheaper solution, you can always download
a Linux LiveCD. That will be a 700MB ISO9660 CD image. If
you have another computer with Nero or Imgburn or the like,
you can use that software to burn a CD. The idea behind a
LiveCD, is your computer boots from the CD, and uses your system RAM
to hold temporary files. It may have an email tool, a web
browser, and support basic computer operations. (You'd have
no place to permanently store files, and it'll still take
some money or someone giving you one of their old drives,
to have a place to store your files.) If you're
as short of funds as you claim to be, you could do this
for as little as the price of a blank CD. (Maybe you
could do the download at your public library.) That's not to
say the Linux LiveCD would be "living in luxury", but it
is an alternative if you cannot stomach the $45 or $90
it'll cost to get your WinXP back. An example of a
CD you might try, is Ubuntu from Ubuntu.com .

http://www.ubuntu.com/sites/default...ktop/U2_desktop_homepage/U2.0_carousel_01.png

Paul
 
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