5672 PXE-E61 & M0F Error - need some help please.

Hey there.
My wife's laptop of 2 years just out of the blue crashed on her.
Now when you boot up the laptop it gets by the Acer loading screen
then just flashes a cursor till the below msg. appears.

Broadcom UNDI PXE-2.1 v8.2.6

PXE-E61: Media Test Failure, Check Cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting Broadcom PEX Rom
Operating System not found

I'm assuming that either the motherboard/cmos is bad or the hard drive just crashed. I've tried reseting the cmos to it's default state, didn't help, also unplugged the cmos battery to reset cmos and that didn't help either.
Reason why i'm also suspecting the motherobard/cmos is I put in an XP Pro disk to boot up off of and it never does even when the cdrom drive is the first in boot cycle. I'd hate to go buy a hard drive replacement and then i still can't boot up to the XP Pro disc to format it. I've also disabled Network Boot.

Since this is out of warranty i've been reading Acer charges $449 up front to service your laptop?? is this right?

Thinking of just scrapping it and buying her the new Dell Studio 15".

any idea for me to try would be appreciative..

 

have you changed the BOOT order in the BIOS to boot from CD ROM?

that error is the result of the PC finding NO boot devices and so it tries to boot from the network cable.... (a feature often used by large companies)

your CMOS battery is dead and has lost data about your HDD,,, or your HDD is dead...

if you change boot oreder to CD ROM as the first option,,, and it doesn't say press any key to boot off CD,,, then you have an even more serious problem

try that and report back

 

thanks for the quick reply bigozone.
Ya, i changed the boot order to have dvd drive first and still no msg. like you normally would get, press spacebar to boot from cdrom.. nope nothing.
tried boot order of hard drive and that didn't help...
In the CMOS it does show the correct Drive model number though..

it's weird too because she was using it just fine in the morning and then after a few hours bam, it just died.

 

try this..

in BIOS set boot order to:

1. CD/DVD drive
2. HDD
3. USB HDD
4. USB floppy
5. network boot PXE (or what ever)

save changes and exit...
put XP or VISTA install disk in DVD DRIVE

then try to boot!

tell me what happens then

 

Fixed, see the bolded.

There should be a key to get into the Boot Menu, without changing the boot order. You just have to hit a key, then select the boot device(in this case the CD and/or DVD drive).