My comps stuck with the above message before Windows can boot up , and says press Control alt and del together ,,, also none of the f buttons are responding .is it knackered ?thanks
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My comps stuck with the above message before Windows can boot up , and says press Control alt and del together ,,, also none of the f buttons are responding .is it knackered ?thanks
Harddisk is probably fubar
If you have access to another computer and a USB flash or hard drive create a bootable drive and see if it boots to get you as far as bios.
Bios does not need anything to boot to. It lives in the motherboard. If you can start the computer and press, F2,Del, F12 or whatever the computer instructs you to press to get to setup, it will give you bios.Quote:
Originally Posted by lucan07
Here is a thought.... do you by chance have a USB stick plugged in? If the computer is set to boot from USB, it may be looking at the USB stick to find windows or a bootable partition.
While BIOS (basic input output system) does live on motherboard and needs nothing to boot it does need to satisfy certain conditions before allowing you to access it.
It processes in the way listed below the order of operations first of which is (POST) see explanation and order below, in many cases failing at g) BIOS may freeze before reaching i) the first point at which a user interface is provided allowing access to both keyboard and screen etc which are user interface devices.
1) POST power on self test, the principal duties of the main BIOS during POST are as follows:
a) verify CPU registers
b) verify the integrity of the BIOS code itself
c) verify basic components like DMA, timer, interrupt controller
d) find, size, and verify system main memory
e) initialize BIOS
f) pass control to other specialized extension BIOSes (if installed)
g) identify, organize, and select which devices are available for booting (IF IT FAILS HERE)
h) discover, initialize, and catalog all system buses and devices
i) provide a user interface for system's configuration (IT MAY NOT REACH HERE)
Thanks lads. A bit of info for you . It packed up several days ago but then it would give me a message telling me Windows was unable to open,it would give me a Windows repair option tab so I'd hit that and let it run for around 20hours yes 20👀...but it would never complete the task as another pop up would appear reading that it's detected a usb device or this that n the other please remove it ,the only thing plugged into it was the power lead,at one point I could use the f2 f8 etc but know I'm locked out of them same with dos ,it would show x:\ instead of c:\ and wouldn't let me change it..if I were to get hold of win installation disc do I not need to access the boot menu .thanks
You normally need access to the bios to tell it to boot from the cd or usb, if its not responding to f2 or f8 then its foobar!
peter
What make and model? The keys to force different bios options vary with BIOS type.
Most laptops from the last 10 to 15 years come set to boot from in order of priority, if present - USB, CD, HDD
Remove the HDD and see what it does, you should at least be able to access BIOS without the system trying to boot from a potentially corrupt drive. HP Compaq have drive test utilities in the BIOS to check for hard errors.
Clean build of Windows? Dell will usually have a hidden recovery partition with the install media, others vary.
If your initial build had separate OS and data partitions you can rebuild Windows without data loss, if not you could put the drive in a cheap USB enclosure and use another PC to retrieve data (and test HDD integrity) before trying a build,
- Nick
Thanks all its a to toshiba saterlite about 4 years old looks like a new laptops on the cards🙄