PC not booting

[123gad]

XP Home Edition will not boot anymore, it starts windows xp but freezes.
Put Disk in for testing, came up with "CdRom testing failure"
Did factory reset, don't know if it worked since I receive message above. Any ideas what else I can try.
Thanks

 

[Rick998]

Have you checked the connections on each end of the ribbon cable between the CDROM drive and motherboard are seated properly?

Have you tried temporarily disabling the CDROM drive (either in the BIOS or by removing the ribbon cable to it) to see if XP boots? If XP does boot then this indicates the CDROM drive is faulty (or the ribbon cable, although this is unlikely).

Hope this helps...

 

[NickCat11]

123gad,

Another route to look at is your hard drive. Does Windows boot up and get to the desktop and then freeze or even freeze? If so, your hard drive may be corrupt. A good way to check this is to disconnect your hard drive and plug it into another computer which should read it like it would an external drive. See how that works. If you don't have another cpu see if your hard drive company has a diagnostic utility you can run. Hope this helps.

Nick

 

[wolluf]

Did factory reset, don't know if it worked since I receive message above.

When did you get that message (ie, I don't know how your factory reset works - did it run for enough time to have copied back the restore data before message?).

Some history on the original problem would be useful (unless it really has 'just started' - but normally there will have been other indicators of developing fault and/or you ahve changed some hardware/software).

As it stands, not sure if hardware, software, driver, spyware, virus issue - or combination of!