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Boot virus?

RougemacintoshRougemacintosh
edited February 2013 in Hardware
Ok i recently got a Dell optiplex GX 150, it needed a Power supply and memory after installing them i tried booting off of the HDD it came with. after showing the windows xp boot screen it shows a BSOD that complains about a unmountable boot volume even if i boot into safe mode. windows ME works on another HDD on it but if i try to boot windows ME with the original drive in it it doesn't recognize it and if i try to boot it off a Windows 98 boot disc or a windows xp setup disc it wont boot off of either (The discs are good they are my dads) and i tested the floppy and the cdrom and they work fine. Could this be a boot virus?
PLEASE HELP!!!!!!

Comments

  • Lupinthe3rdLupinthe3rd
    Make sure jumpers are set correctly when booting with two drives in. As for XP booting, it might not like the RAM chip installed. Try with a different stick or just one stick.
  • RougemacintoshRougemacintosh
    i have the jumper set correct i will try different memory
  • gdea73gdea73
    The original drive is probably bad. For whatever reason, 80% of old PCs I acquire have dead hard drives. Probably why they were tossed.

    Are you sure the XP installation on there was original anyway? Even in Safe Mode, an OEM XP install on a different machine will likely screw up booting.
  • DeepFriedCookiesDeepFriedCookies
    I've never ran into it once, tbh. Odd, huh?
  • gdea73gdea73
    Well I did also have a motherboard that abused hard drives when used, so that killed like 4... :P
  • KirkKirk
    gdea73 wrote:
    Well I did also have a motherboard that abused hard drives when used, so that killed like 4... :P
    What? What you've just described should not happen.
  • noonenoone
    Kirk wrote:
    gdea73 wrote:
    Well I did also have a motherboard that abused hard drives when used, so that killed like 4... :P
    What? What you've just described should not happen.
    I'd assume that there was some regulation problems on the IDE bus which would likely dump more current into the drive's logic board that it can't handle. If there were problems with the IDE bus, there would likely be issues elsewhere that would begin popping up over time.
  • gdea73gdea73
    Yeah, there was a thread on it somewhere on here. The IDE bus must have been damaged by the previous power supply. When I got the board, it was in an Antec case with a built in proprietary PSU that looked crappy, and I never bothered to test it.

    Also the drives that were originally attached were in the several thousands of bad sectors.

    So I guess a really bad PSU over time may have damaged the IDE bus which in turn supplies an excess of current to the hard disks.
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