BIOS hangs after post

Visti

Hi guys, I'm freaking out a bit here. I was installing XP on my desktop computer, which previously had 7 on it using a CD that has previously worked perfectly. About halfway through the install the power goes.

No big deal, I was wiping everything, so no data's lost or anything like that. However, now my BIOS hangs after displaying a nice post. RAM detected and verified, hard disks detected aaaand.. hang. I can press either F2 to enter BIO Setup or F11 for the boot menu and those changes are reflected as I press ("Setup selected"), but doesn't change the fact that nothing's happening.


tl;dr - BIOS hangs after unproblematic post, can't enter setup or boot selection, what to do?

Visti

Pulled out CMOS battery to reset, no change.. This is way uncool.

HooverFan

unplug the hard drives and see if it tries to continue on and at least gives you an error saying there's no disk...

stigweard

Unplug your hdds / cdrom and try to boot to see if you get a boot disc not found error.

Mr. Buttons

just want to check. you say you pulled the battery... did you just pull the battery out and put it back in, or did you pull it out for a few minutes and swap the jumper as well?

travathian

Visti wrote: »

Pulled out CMOS battery to reset, no change.. This is way uncool.

Check the user manual for your motherboard. Just pulling the CMOS battery used to always reset CMOS but that is definitely not always the case with newer motherboard. You may have to move a jumper and power up the unit. Also visually inspect the motherboard for damage, dust build up, etc.

Visti

Pullling the hdds out revealed that it will, in fact, not hang if the secondary hdd is out of the box. I connected it to my linux laptop, wiped it and can now boot into the XP install again. It's odd because it wasn't the hdd I was installing onto. Oh, well.


Thanks for the help!