Someone plz help pc wont boot

Alright so I built my dad a new computer about a week ago and its been working just fine, until today...I was trying to install a cd burning program on his computer and I put the disk in the drive but it wouldnt load. I went into My Computer and noticed that it didnt recognize his disk drive, it just wasnt there. When I went into Device manager it showed his disk drive with a yellow exclamation point next to it.

SO I just went ahead and restarted the computer. It bios loaded up and everything, the Start Windows normally and safe mode screen popped up and I hit "last known good configuration". Windows starts to boot up but then the little blue loading bar just stops at the end and the pc crashes and restarts.

I built him this computer because I was die-hard telling him never to buy another prebuilt but now that im running into problems its really begging to piss me off. Can someone please help me.

Dude....I just set this pc up like last week and I really would rather not reformat it. If it makes any difference, when I went to open the disk drive something made a beep. I dunno what it was, hasnt beeped since.

So you can't boot into the PC at all?

Have you tried to boot into safe mode? safe mode with networking?

If you can get into safe mode the chances are that very likely there has been a driver conflict between the burning software and the DVD / CD? drive.

What operating system are you using?

What was the burning utility you tried to install?

If you can get into safe mode, uninstall the burning utility and then perform a system restore back to prior to the installation of the burning software.

You might even try to boot the pc up with the drive(s) temporarily disconnected... delete their drivers (via device manager).... shutdown the PC and unplug from power outlet.... reconnect the drive(s)... boot pc up and let it detect the drives again.

FYI: A single beep during boot-up is an indication that the POST (Power on self test) was successful.

Of course you have posted in the XP forum... so this must be your OS.

There could be a hardware failure.

Try unplugging the PC from the power outlet.

Unplug all hardware peripherals. i.e. Disk drives, graphics card (if you have onboard use that instead), any extra HDD's aside from the one the OS is on, sound card and if you have more than 1 stick of RAM just have one installed (remove all, reseat only one).

Try then to see if you can achieve a successful boot.

Usually the motherboard will throw out error beep codes when there is hardware failure, but I'm assuming because you got the single beep earlier that you have a motherboard speaker.

Yeah everything spins up fine, temps are 31C so no problems there. I'm not sure if the beep was an error beep or not but I can try unhooking everything and whatnot. Thanks for the help.

You can perform a repair install of the operating system.

This is probably the best shot you will have before a fully fledged reinstall.

It is meant to leave all data intact (hotfixes / patches & MS updates aside).

Here is a tutorial:

http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/How [...] -t138.html

Once the repair install has been performed you can run chkdsk for HDD errors:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315265

You didn't answer my question about what burning suite you were trying to intall.

By any chance was it Roxio you were attempting to install on the machine?

There are many reports of this software causing issues.

I would first remove the burning software from the PC using Revo Uninstaller, freeware, with advanced mode (the slowest but most thorough):

http://www.revouninstaller.com/

Reboot the pc and see if the drive has regained functionality.

If that doesn't work there is an old Tom's thread with a registry fix to remove the yellow exclamation point from Device Manager.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] tion-point

Please heed the warning about backing up your registry first.

If after these steps you can use the CD / DVD drive again you might want to consider different burning software. CDBurnerXP is a very good freeware alternative:

http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/C [...] nerxp.html

There are plenty of user reviews you can view.

The registry fix is designed to repair the drive detection issues after a reboot.