failure to boot

[Howard Martin]

Hi,
Hope someone can help.
I went to turn on my pc the other day and I got the normal (for my pc) 3 screens up on my monitor, first the graphics card info then the memory check and drives check and lastly the boot up screen. At the bottom of the last screen it said.....

'updating escd success
verifying dmi pool data.......... update success
boot from cd : failure
boot from cd : failure
_ '

Normally my pc would boot in then but this time it stayed there so I turn it off then on again and I got the usual 3 screens then...

'boot from cd : failure
boot from cd : failure
_'

So I put in a msdos start up disk and the screen reads...

'boot from cd : failure
boot from cd : failure
starting.....
A:\> mode con codepage prepare=((850) ega.cpi)
MODE prepare code page function completed
A:\> mode con codepage select=850
MODE select code page function completed
A:\>keyb uk,,keybrd2.sys
A:\>
A:\>_

What happens now?
Any advise will be greatly appreciated.
Heres hoping, H :confused:

[dcc]

It looks like the POST has found a problem with your CD drive. Check you IDE cable and power connector.

You could also try turning off your computer, disconnect the IDE and power cables from the drive, turn the computer back on and then back off, reinstall the connectors and see if the drive is recognized as new hardware found when you turn the computer back one.

Do you have another machine that you could try your drive in to be sure that it hasn't died?

A work around that you could try is to go into the BIOS and change the "stop on" settings to "stop on all errors", yeah it sounds counter intuitive.

[Howard Martin]

Thanks to your quick response. Will try what you suggested & let you know how I got on.
All the best H

[Howard Martin]

Well, I tried most of what was suggested but to no avail.

(The screen that said "boot from CD : failure.
boot from CD : failure." always used to come up, then the hard drive would kick in.)

BUT my son (bless im) told me he had used our reload back up CD. On this CD it has an option to Repair boot sectors, which he did thinking it would do no harm, after which our PC refused to boot.(good lad for being honest)I have now tried this again to see what happens and after it repairs the boot sectors a message on the screen says
,
MBR, BPB, BPB backup and the FSInfo replaced
Restart windows and run your virus scanner.
This will determine the further existence of a virus.

Now I'm 99% sure I don't have a virus because of all the anti-virus software in place, but a thought did occur, the files on my PC where originally FAT32 and about 18 months ago I changed them to NTFS.
Would this course a problem to the repair of the boot sectors?
Its the only thing I can think of thats different to when I repaired the boot sectors ( when they where still FAT32).