Continuous rebooting at startup

[tburrows]

We acquired an HP Pavilion N5450 laptop running windows ME. It probably has a virus as when the machine starts up the first screen comes up and then just keeps rebooting from there. I tried F8, but I don't think the boot process is getting that far so I can use safe mode. I tried a bootable floppy that I made from an XP machine, but when I finally get it to boot with the floppy and I try to access the hard drive I get an error message that says Invalid Media Type. Any thoughts on the matter would be greatly appreciated.

Tom

 

[ski]

If you get that message at a C:\> prompt, then at an A:/> prompt type chkdsk c:

If no luck, then at an A:\> prompt type format c:
(NOTE-This will format the HD and all data will be lost.)

If that does not work, then the HD is probably bad.

 

[olkt]

You said that you [“]finally[”] got your laptop to boot from your floppy disk. Did you have difficulty booting from your floppy disk? In addition, you may try booting from a Windows 98 or ME startup disk and running Scandisk, which should be on the startup disk, on C drive. Another option is to boot from your laptop[’]s recovery CD if it came with one[—]it should erase everything on your hard drive and restore the software and OS that came with your laptop. You might want to check the BIOS settings that have to do with the hard drive, as well.

 

[tburrows]

I think I may have found the main problem. Two of the connector pins from the hard drive are broken. Looking for parts. now.
Appreciate the assistance.

 

[micker377]

The bottom row, center pin is missing on purpose - it is to align connector. Look up your hard drive and see if you are really "missing" these pins.

 

[tburrows]

I know they are missing as they were broken off into the female connector on the motherboard.