Window Hanging up on POST

Hello, yes, Im new and yes, I know (atleast, I like think so) how to use the search function, but believe me, the closest thing I found was useless to me. Details, as you prolly gonna need...

AMD Athlon 600
394mb ram
win xp
maxtor 6gb

(hey, is an office comp, so dont ask )

The comp just hangs on POST just before the memory check, no errors reported. I tried swapping both memory sticks, no effect. Using one or the other in either bank, no effect. Unplugged everything and booted with a disk, no effect, win98's Fdisk (its all I have) wont see NTFS.

Im lost, usually Im able to solve a small thing lik this one, but this time seems Im gonna need the pros. Help me, please, or I'll set the darn thing on fire...

PS: the forums didnt let me use my Gmail acc to register, so I used the one from work. I use Gmail as pop3 on my house, any chance of being able to use it here?

 

Hi and welcome to the BBS,
It sounds like you have covered a lot of areas. There is no other added hardware that can be disconnected? If not, the only other things I can suggest you test are each of the drives, by disconnecting them one at a time. Try another keyboard, it is quite important at startup. You can try starting without the mouse connected. It seems like the stage where the BIOS "looks around" for hardware connected to the motherboard, you generally see a brief flash of the LEDs on those items. If you see an LED stay on, that is probably the point at which it is crashing.

Try swapping the power supply for another. It should be an ATX type, just check the power connector at the motherboard. If it is a Dell machine or other branded type, it may need a specialized power supply.

Probably the last thing to try is to "clear the CMOS ". This will be described in the motherboard manual (you need to disconnect all power and move a jumper cap on the motherboard). Alternatively, you could remove the CMOS battery for a period of time (at least 1/2 an hour). Get another CMOS battery just in case, but it should not be the cause of these types of problems.

Matt

 

You can download the XP boot disc's from the MS Website Floppy (6) or CD.
hawk22

 

Thought about the CMOS just after I made the thread, I even bought a new battery just in case, and no, that didnt worked either. So I just took the comp to specialized technical support, Im done with it and gotta work with files I have in that thing. I need this solved ASAP.

Thanks anyway.

 

For future reference, if you need to get data off an NTFS formatted drive, you need to connect the HDD into another computer with Win 2000 or higher and access the files from there.
Hope it goes well.

Matt