Hello there, I have a friend's computer that quit booting one day. He said he didn't add any progs or hardware recently. He did change a power management setting to keep his hard drive from going off after 20 minutes about 2 days before it stopped booting though. I tried booting in safe mode and from cd and then from floppy but to no avail. It hung on verifying dmi pool data. Then I tried reading his hard drive from my xp machine. It said it was not formatted. I tried to format it and it said the drive cannot be formatted. I have also taken the battery out of his computer and that didn't solve anything either. Now the light comes on like its reading my startup disk but hangs on a black screen with a blinking cursor at the top left corner after it gets the cdrom drivers loaded. Before i tried to format it unsuccessfully, it used to show the windows screen and freeze when trying to boot with cd support. Now its worse, it doesn't even get that far. Any one have any suggestions other than a hammer? Any help at all would be great. Could his hard drive just have gone bad? Thanks in advance :)

That's a bad hard drive....

It does sound like the hard drive has bitten the bullet. This should not affect booting from the other drives. Have a look in bios and see if it is recognised correctly there. If it isn't, you could try and check that the cables are securely connected. Also try disconnecting the hard drive and boot from the floppy.

It is a 160 gig hard drive and it shows up in the bios as 130 or 139 I think. Since its the only drive on the computer how can i do anything by disconnecting it and boot from floppy?

Since you cannot boot with any drive and it looks like the harddrive is at fault, the quickest way to confirm whether or not it is the problem, is to try using the system without it present.

I had this same problem last week after I made some stupid changes that affected my boot drive. But we won't go into that... I resolved the problem by putting the drive in another computer to format and partition it. Then I put it back in my computer with the Windows cd and let Windows format it as NTFS again before reinstalling the OS. Afterwards, I used recovery software to recover everything I needed from it (copied it to a second HDD). I couldn't recover the partition Windows was installed on, though. The point is, what I thought was a defective new HDD was actually operator error. I would have been devastated to have lost nearly 150gb of stuff I had collected on that 250gb drive. So if you can, check it out real well before you trash it. -Gigabyte K8N Ultra 9 939 w/nForce4 Ultra chipset -1gb DDR400 PC3200 RAM -Albatron GeForce 6600GT 128mb/128-bit g-card -MGE 500W PSU w/2 fans -Future Power "Power 5E" analog LCD monitor<br