Computer won't start

[mitk0o0o0]

Hello. First of all, I'm sorry if this is the wrong board for such question.

My cousin can't turn on her computer anymore. Everytime she pushes the power button, it directly starts up the BIOS menu and if you exit you go nowhere (black screen) and so you have to restart the computer by unplugging the cable and power it up again and it will still go to BIOS menu. Before I remember it would display the hard disk model, memory and other stuff but now nothing but just BIOS.

We've tried the F5 option which restores default values and then saved changes but that also didn't solve problem. Is this some kind of hardware problem? Could it be the memory? Because there it displays 512MB (Which is how much they have installed).

She had Windows XP SP2 running if that's needed.

 

[smorizio]

what happen is her hard drive has failed. it failed in a way that it locking the system up at post so that your not getting a hard drive or no boot disk message. if you can take the case off and put your hand on the hard drive and power the pc on it should spin up and stay st the same speed if you feel it spin down or no all all or it making a clicking sound..the drive is dead. if your lucky sometime the old drive and the lube goes bad if the pc been off for a wile and then she turn the pc on and it did this lighly tapping on the drive sometime free a stuck drive and get it to boot one more time where you can get the data off. if the hd is not spinning up that you can feel power the pc off and unplug the power to the drive..if the drive is dead but not powered on at the next power up you should get a message that no boot device is found

 

[mitk0o0o0]

what happen is her hard drive has failed. it failed in a way that it locking the system up at post so that your not getting a hard drive or no boot disk message. if you can take the case off and put your hand on the hard drive and power the pc on it should spin up and stay st the same speed if you feel it spin down or no all all or it making a clicking sound..the drive is dead. if your lucky sometime the old drive and the lube goes bad if the pc been off for a wile and then she turn the pc on and it did this lighly tapping on the drive sometime free a stuck drive and get it to boot one more time where you can get the data off. if the hd is not spinning up that you can feel power the pc off and unplug the power to the drive..if the drive is dead but not powered on at the next power up you should get a message that no boot device is found

Thans for the reply. If the hard disk has failed wouldn't there still pop up a message saying something like "disk failure"?

We'll still try your suggestion though.

 

[smorizio]

if the drive controller was not the part that failed after about 2 min the computer would have timed out and given you that message. with the controller hanging the system it will never give you that message unless the hard drive is powered off.