Centurion won't boot

[gerard]

Elder son has a Gladiator Centurion CB6300 which 2 days ago wouldn't boot. MSI P965 NEO (7235 v1.5), Core 2 duo 6300, 3GB (originally 1GB), 320GB SATA HDD, ATI X1950XT 256mb, 2 DVD drives, Floppy. XP Home originally SP2 but updated to SP3. I found a floppy "boot to MS DOS" disc for it which I must have made in 2006. (There is a 1% chance that it was made for the original Centurion - this one is a replacement - but the label says not.)

I can get into the BIOS settings and POST is OK. I can get to the A prompt for the floppy but I've forgotten what little DOS I ever knew. How do I get it to boot from the floppy? Any ideas what may have gone wrong? The CPU ran pretty hot for a period about 18 months ago until I cleaned the cooler (and the Graphics card) but it has been OK on fairly demanding games since. I suspect the hard drive is very full indeed.

Any help would be much appreciated. Alec can do his A level homework and revision on a laptop but sanity is preserved by the games!

Gerard

[Spaceboy]

if you can get to the A: prompt you're already booting off the floppy :)

As for getting windows to load...
What happens when you boot without the floppy? Any errors? Blue screen?
Is the hard drive detected during bootup or in the bios?
Do you have an XP cd to hand ?

If it's booting to BIOS your mobo/cpu/gpu is most likely okay :thumb:

[joker3327]

Got good virus checker/malware/ spyware defence?

[gerard]

Thank you both very much. Anti virus is Avast. No previous malware problems on this machine as far as I can remember.

No blue screen. On attempting to boot from HDD it stops at screen with "Verifying DMI Pool Data..." at the bottom. The Bios is Award. No sign of a hard drive that I can see but I don't know where I would expect to find mention of a SATA HDD. I have got the original XP Home SP2 disc. I don't know how to load it from the A prompt. Is there any hope of getting to the existing XP installation from DOS? How would you do it? It wouldn't be a disaster if the HDD is wiped but it would be a bit time consuming so I would prefer to avoid it if poss.

I suppose it might be an idea to open it up and see if the hard drive is moving?

Thanks again

Gerard

[Spaceboy]

Okay, the "Verifying DMI Pool Data..." sounds like your machine is having trouble detecting the hard disk at all, which also explains why you can't find it in the BIOS.

You won't be able to see any moving parts in the hard disk, and even if you can hear it spin up it doesn't indicate that it's working ok. Most "dead" drives will still spin up.

Best bet at this point is to unplug the hard drive power and data cables, and plug them in again. If you've a spare cable it might be worth replacing. Hopefully it's just a loose connection.

If you have troubles after that I'd try putting the drive into a 2nd PC if at all possible and seeing if that can detect it in the BIOS and if so, if it's detectable in that 2nd PC's copy of windows.

[gerard]

Progress of a sort. Replugging cables and swapping the data cable - no effect. Tried the drive in a homebuild PC (normally Windows 7) with esata socket for external HDD. Sees it and the files. Tried booting from it. Windows XP screen comes up and then choice of normal, safe etc screen. Every version just ends up going back to the choice screen without actually starting XP but the PC restarts during this loop. Am I doing something wrong at this stage? Should I just try to reinstall XP (possibly currently scrambled) from the CD ROM onto the drive on this PC? The newer PC has virtual XP installed within 7 - never actually used it yet. . Would this matter?

Would have helped if we hadn't had repeated earth trips today and my nearly new printer literally shrieking to a halt! But you are being extremely helpful - thankyou very much

Gerard

[gerard]

A long gap as I was on holiday and a catalogue of problems - but it now works!

Decided to install a 1TB HDD instead of the overfull 320GB with scrambled XP and accept having to reload everything. No sign of HDD. I assume I had sabotaged the BIOS at some point. On the MSI P965NEO MS 7235 m/b you have to load the Jmicron RAID driver even if you are not using RAID, otherwise SATA HDDs are invisible. The manual does NOT make this clear and most of us might not guess!

Then having loaded XP I couldn't load Catalyst and driver (version 6.5 on CDROM) for the ATI Radeon X1950XT graphics card - and the whole point was to run games. Kept saying "try to load standard VGA driver first" - but there is no VGA capability on this m/b and it seems to have been a very common problem in XP with a shortage of solutions. Anyway after further poring over even more forums I downloaded Catalyst and driver legacy version 9.2 (NOT newest versions as apparently there are problems). It worked and we had a celebratory lunch at the pub. The rest of this afternoon (I am a retired layabout) has been spent reloading the workaday programs and doing 5 years worth of updates.

Thank you everyone who has made suggestions. I have a happier teenager revising for 5 A levels and a modest feeling of achievement, however undeserved.