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General discussion

Black Screen System Crash (ohmygosh!)

Sep 23, 2004 2:52AM PDT

BLACK SCREEN SYSTEM CRASH (ohmygod!):

Greetings,

My system just crashed on me and I?m unable to reboot. My OS is 2000 Pro and I have Office 2000 Pro.

While I was burning a CD, I foolishly tried to access some high-end .JPG photo files (1-2MB each). Well, my monitor screen went black and the computer seemed to die. Repeated attempts to reboot proved futile. When powering up I got the Gateway logo screen and the bootup progress bar only got half-way across before stopping.

I have no idea what damage has been done to my system. BTW, I have a circa 1998 Gateway 450MB Pentium II with 512 RAM. I have two separate resident hard drives:
Master ? Drives C and D (about 30 GB overall)
Slave ? Drives E and F (about 80 GB overall)
[ Fortunately, my son has a spare bare-bones computer, which I?m using now. ]

What I need to know is: (a) how to determine the extent of damage to my system; and (b) how to recover my computer to pre-crash status.

Any assistance ? direct and referral ? that anyone can render will be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks.

Discussion is locked

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Re: Black Screen System Crash (ohmygosh!)
Sep 23, 2004 3:03AM PDT

"I?m unable to reboot. My OS is 2000 Pro"

That, in a nutshell is all I can use from your post. But it lacks detail about the failed boot. For instance if the screen never shows a logo or BIOS screen then we are looking at hardware failures.

If you can't boot the Windows 2000 CD, then we have possible hardware failures.

Use a lot more words to describe "unable to reboot".

Bob

PS. We most likely can't get back to exactly before the crash since most don't backup their system. Hard disks can stop spinning and that's why we prepare. Some are not ready...

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Re: Barebones troubleshooting
Sep 23, 2004 5:15AM PDT

On boot press the "tab" key. This will display the BIOS post screen. The BIOS is attempting to find a device and cannot causing the hang. If you cannot determine the device or BIOS post screen will not display follow the following steps....

1. open case-> remove ribbon and power cables
from all devices. Attempt boot,

2. Attach ONE device at each boot starting with
Floppy -> H/d (master) -> H/d slave -> Cd-roms's any failure to boot will indicate bad device.

I'll stop at this point and check back later or someone else will jump in to guide you futher.

Bill
.

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Re: Black Screen System Crash (ohmygosh!)
Sep 25, 2004 10:15AM PDT

as soon as you boot and hear the beep, if you get constant beeping then you have a hardware issue--a pci card out of place, memory card out of place, or actual failure you can remove and reinsert the pci card for example, just be sure to unscrew the screw holding it in place first--press Tab, Delete, or F1 depends on what motherboard you have. Most will be the Delete key. Keeping pressing one of the above keys until you get into the blue screen. Use your keyboard arrow keys to find the standard setup or general setup and hit Enter key with it highlighted. This will show you what your hardware your motherboard recognizes. If you see your hard drives missing, try hitting the Esc key 1 time then look for a setting called IDE drives or something similar and hit Enter
for each drive listed make sure the setting is on auto, you change this by pressing page up or page down. Press F10 anytime to save changes, then type y for yes or n for no and press Enter. Computer reboots. If this works for you then Hit F8 as soon as the gateway logo disappears. You'll get an option for boot up into 2000 pro. highlight the safe mode option and hit Enter. If it can't boot into safemode, then you may want to take it to a bestbuy or similar place, however, with your computer being a 1998 you may be better off buying a new system. Hope this helps.