Need help with a 7170

Got a 7170 that will only boot up if you hold F8 will turning it on, sometimes delete or F2 will do it. If you power up normally you hear the hard drive and sometimes the fan run.
any suggestions?

 

A little more detail please?
What happens after you hear the HD when it won't boot?
When you F8 you can choose from several modes, are you choosing "Normal" or one of the others?
When is the last time you cleaned your keyboard?

 

If you just hit the power button it will just sit there with the screen blank and you can hear the hard drive and sometimes the fan run.

When you power it up by holding/tapping F8 it just starts up, does not give you any options. It just flashes the Averatec screen then goes to the XP logo and starts right up.

Keyboard has been blowed off, do you suggest doing something different?

It seems to work ok after starting it this way, my daughter is using this laptop at college so she has it there now. I might try recleaning the keyboard.

 

Yes try suction - you don't really want to shove particles deeper into the machine bits.

It sounds like the boot load sequence has been bugged up - maybe viri but more likely just MSbacteria


When you boot you can hear the sequences but when it reads the instructions to automatic like load XP it hangs - probably gets told to go somewhere or do something it can't so it just stops.

The F8 intervenes in the "normal" automatic like sequence and offers a choice screen.

It "sounds" or "reads" to me that you have a fast key rate and/or you are holding down the F8 key and skipping past the choices so fast you don't see them. I can replicate that here.


I have a MBR on this 7100 that has been F'd up by my GRUB app. It does exactly that - it just goes to black screen and does nothing until I reboot/start - unless I F8.

There is a tech release from MS about it.
I can't seem to post it here due to board restrictions SO just Google up
"upport 314503" and choose the MS page.
It says to use the recovery console to fix the master boot record. It is easy enough to do and you should be able to back up your data first.

here:
slash slash neosmart.net/blog/2005/repairing-a-fubard-master-boot-record
slash
is a good read on it to understand the bits



As a point of reference
When I tap the F8 key just once - on this 7100 - I get a choice of modes to up arrow to.
The SECOND time F8 gives a different choice screen a third tap choses and loads XP.

The delete and F2 key don't seem to get it past here but that may be a keyboard thing. Try to just tap once and wait it out and see, also try setting the key rate down and then try it again.


The test for a wacked MBR is to boot to DOS and see if you have a valid HD list.
Since XP loads you must have one. My guess is it just needs a small repair.

Your daughter can do this and probably has a tech at school who can help. it takes less time then typing all this.

 

I glanced at this article and wondering if the fixmbr will help since I have already reinstalled windows.

 

As we here recall there is a problem with MS OS's needing to be installed first because of the way they uniquely alter the MBR.
Also one of those pages warns that the partitions should be made first then MS loaded.
SO...
It may be that the MS OS just can't see the correct partition/logical drive data to find its way to a full boot up. A reinstall of MS would not correct that unless the entire drive was repartitioned and formatted before the OS was loaded.

The DEL key has puzzled us. It would lead us to think about basic I/O errors. Again the I/O's are addressed in the MBR.


Our XPHome recovery disc should be recovered from storage in the next few days. We will try to record what we do to fix the 7100 and post it here.

 

We got our data disc's today.

So we tried to just reinstall XPHome and it did not fix the black screen problem.
Next we used the Averatec Restore disc.
Problem solved!

BUT....
The restore disc is nothing more than a tiny (DOS?) program that writes a disc image over the entire HD and writes the MBR anew. So all data and partitions are lost.
The nice bit is that it restores all the drivers so - so far so good.