What to Do When Your PC Won’t Boot

My kids’ PC, which is a bit of a hybrid machine that I put together a couple of years ago from cannibalized parts, was getting stuck at the boot stage. The boot-up screen claimed it recognized the primary master (boot) hard drive, but that was as far as it would go. Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) didn’t prove of much use and even disconnecting the various PCI cards, the DVD re-writer and the slave hard drive had no impact. I re-set the BIOS to default values, but to no avail.

A quick search for the phrase “capable and status ok” together with “Boot problem” brought up a page that mentioned the CMOS battery on the motherboard. On reading this, a little lightswitch flipped in my head and reading further I saw the final clue as to how get this mother unstuck - jumpers. Yes, jumpers, those little metal pins that protrude from motherboards and can be “shorted” with a little brass connector. Incidentally, you shouldn’t touch the contact faces of these little lithium batteries, as the grease from your fingers will cause them problems in the long-run potentially reducing battery life.

Next to the CMOS battery is just such a clutch of jumpers, the brass connector straddles two of three in the default position, but moving it to the other two of the triplet has the effect of resetting everything when you reboot.

So, that done, I thought the machine would happily boot up, and it did kind of, it went past the POST page and on to the settings but then a flash of something unreadable about boots and sectors was replaced by a single blinking cursor.

One more try at CMOS resetting, but this time with the Windows XP CD in the machine to catch the boot as the machine restarts got me back to the Windows setup program, thankfully, and the option to reinstall or restore. Reluctantly, I took the latter option, so that I could get the kids’ machine back to a pristine state, now all seems hunky dory and AVG Antivirus is currently scanning both hard drives for cr*p, of which it has found a little already and immediately vaulted.

Moral of the tale? Sometimes you really do have to reset a PC back to its original state to get a functional POST-BOOT-OS sequence. Thank goodness for jumpers.