Strange things

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by zxspectrum, Nov 14, 2017.

  1. zxspectrum

    zxspectrum Terabyte Poster Forum Leader Gold Member

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    So last Thursday, I diagnosed a PC where 2 lots of ram had issues, after that the pc was tempremental, as in at first it wouldnt start, then it would, then again on the friday after it working perfectly, decided not to start. I was on the phone to Dell in which they got me doing tests here and there and they sent out a motherboard, power switch and the cable that connects to the switch.

    Today the dell engineer was there and fitted a new motherboard plus the power switch and cable, and guess what, nothing happened. After a bit of messing about it was deemed that the new motherboard was faulty as it wasnt brand new, it was a refurb, so he put the old on back in, in the meantime we had swapped a processor from an exact same machine. Still nothing but after about 5 mins, everything did as it was supposed to, except the hard drive, the error we got from that was that there was no bootable media, which is very strange as it did work? So now I have to mess about with the HD, possibly get them to send out a new one etc.

    Upon plugging the HD into an external dock, i found that it showed me some files, however, There was no windows files and folders on, which is still baffling me as we speak. An OS cant just vanish can it? Could there be a virus on there that I am missing or not aware of?

    I am just looking on google now and I have come across this little snippet of info

    'It looks like the MBR has been deleted. I'd run a scan with an antimalware boot cd, then run fixmbr (google it), then boot and run Malwarebytes to make sure everything is OK. Win 7 hasn't been deleted, it looks like the option to start it has been. Alternatively, I'd reformat and yell at the person who was using the system.'

    Could this be the reason why I am not getting hd to boot now, also could it have caused all the other faults/issues?

    Quite interesting if it has and I know who to shout at as well

    Ed
     
    Certifications: BSc computing and information systems
    WIP: 70-680
  2. dmarsh
    Honorary Member 500 Likes Award

    dmarsh Petabyte Poster

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    Normally the boot order in the bios is the first thing that determines the boot order.
    Secondly its the stuff like MBR or UEFI partition.

    Once you get past that you start loading windows off the primary partition.

    No a corrupt MBR wouldn't cause a machine to be erratic, it would either be good or bad.

    Sometimes large changes like a different processor could cause the BIOS to adopt system defaults, which would be my guess here for why it changed after the processor was switched.

    I don't know what tools you used in the dock, but windows explorer only shows mounted volumes and its possible that some partitions aren't mounted or assigned drive letters.
     
  3. Juelz

    Juelz Gigabyte Poster

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    Well tbh you could have no HDD and the PC would still bootup.. it would just fail POST, you sure its getting enough power? I take it when it does boot the CPU fan is spinning? Also instead of a reformat what about running windows repair utility?
     
  4. zxspectrum

    zxspectrum Terabyte Poster Forum Leader Gold Member

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    Well, i have some good news to share

    Its all back up and running, it looks like someone decided to mess about with the bios settings, instead of legacy i changed to UEFI and hey presto it now boots up. There was an issue with a graphics card that was also causing an issue but even that has been rectified.

    Cheers for the advice, very much appreciated

    Ed
     
    Certifications: BSc computing and information systems
    WIP: 70-680
    JK2447 likes this.

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