Computer on life support

My computer at home picked yesterday to decide that the only bootable device it had was the floppy drive. Not sure what’s going on, but no amount of cajoling, bribery or tinkering in the BIOS was able to get it to see anything other than the floppy drive as a bootable device. The BIOS is recognizing all the drives, just doesn’t let me choose any of them as a boot disk. Darned thing won’t even boot off a CD either.
On the plus side, it boots up just fine from floppy.
Time for some intensive troubleshooting. I have a feeling I’ll have to accelerate my plans to replace this computer and get a new one much sooner than I planned. I was really enjoying the Powerleaped CPU too. It’ll be really disappointing if I can’t get the computer up and running again.
Maybe I can just get a new motherboard off EBay.
Update: I was able to boot up another computer using my boot drive, so I think something on the motherboard finally gave out.


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2 Replies to “Computer on life support”

  1. Hey, I had this problem before…failing hard drive and it basically wasn’t functioning and the motherboard wasn’t detecting it. Hope this isn’t happening to you!

  2. @Dale:
    He said that the system wouldn’t boot from a CD either, so I seriously doubt that the problem is the hard drive. It’s most likely the IDE controller (Southbridge Chipset) on the motherboard. Of course I would check the cable connections on the motherboard before coming to this conclusion.

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