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Computer won't start up - need help diagnosing problem.
Cojones
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hi H/A,
My brother's computer won't start up and I need some help determining what the problem's likely to be.
He said that the computer(only a couple of years old, with an otherwise impeccable track record) was knocked onto its side by his dog and since then it won't start up. He recruited me to try and fix it. I am absolutely no pro.
When booting up, before the Windows splash screen would appear, an error message with "BOOTMGR image is corrupt" appears. There didn't seem to be a way to get around this, so I made up a copy of Ubuntu 11.04 on DVD(thinking that if there was HDD damage booting an OS from DVD would get around it), changed the boot order so that it'd try to boot from the DVD drive first, inserted it and got the error: "Unable to boot from CD. Code 5".
A little unnerved, I run hardware diagnostics from the BIOS, which indicated that something was wrong with the HDD(I didn't note down the error codes or any details, silly me) but everything else checked out. This still leaves the question of how I couldn't seem to start an OS from DVD(or USB drive, I tried that too).
Any help?
My brother's computer won't start up and I need some help determining what the problem's likely to be.
He said that the computer(only a couple of years old, with an otherwise impeccable track record) was knocked onto its side by his dog and since then it won't start up. He recruited me to try and fix it. I am absolutely no pro.
When booting up, before the Windows splash screen would appear, an error message with "BOOTMGR image is corrupt" appears. There didn't seem to be a way to get around this, so I made up a copy of Ubuntu 11.04 on DVD(thinking that if there was HDD damage booting an OS from DVD would get around it), changed the boot order so that it'd try to boot from the DVD drive first, inserted it and got the error: "Unable to boot from CD. Code 5".
A little unnerved, I run hardware diagnostics from the BIOS, which indicated that something was wrong with the HDD(I didn't note down the error codes or any details, silly me) but everything else checked out. This still leaves the question of how I couldn't seem to start an OS from DVD(or USB drive, I tried that too).
Any help?
Cojones on
0
Posts
Sounds like your brother's hdd is the problem there, though you should also check to make sure cables, cards, and memory are all still seated properly. There are Linux tools that can recover data from even partially crashed drives, but I'm not super familiar with them off the top of my head.
If so, is it also likely that any other components are broken? How can I go about diagnosing any further damage?
Thanks very much for all help offered.
Otherwise it sounds like the Master Boot Record is corrupt. Hopefully you have a cd copy of whatever Windows version he has. If so, you can attempt to repair it.
If the CD drive won't work for anything then HDD could indeed be damaged. In which case you're going to need to acquire a new one and try to recover any files from the broken drive later.