PC Boot sequence, stops after POST

[donscastle]

Windows NT 4.0 Workstation SP5, Dell Dimension L466c. System has been working for many months. Yesterday, when first powered on, it would not boot (was working on 1/2/01). Does go through POST, then when I expect it to access hard drive, nothing happens; no messages, just blank screen.
CMOS settings look good. Can boot off DOS floppy and see hard drive. Scandisk is fine. Virus scan okay. Tried fdisk /mbr, no message, no effect.
Unfortunately, I don't have another hard drive to master/slave and copy files. And of course I don't want to lose my data.
What has happened? Master Boot Record corruption/virus?
Can it be fixed? Thanks much for any suggestions.

 

[maker10]

Try going into the cmos and set your hardware to its default settings. I'm not sure what the actual keystrokes would be for a Dell, but if you poke around in there you should find it.

If that doesn't help you may want to install a parallel copy of winnt into a folder with a different name. It's very important that you don't choose the default c:\winnt or you could risk overwriting and messing up your software and OS. Hope this helps.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

It does seem like a corrupt MBR - especially if you can boot from a floppy.

If the hard disk is formatted NTFS, there are boot disks that can read NTFS, such as

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q119/4/67.ASP

but you may find yourself locked out because of permissions.

An alternative would be to put the disk into a machine already running NT and take ownership of it.

Note: With some older DELLs, resetting the CMOS to defaults will remove the hard disk information. Really old machines do not have the Auto-detect feature, and you may have to enter disk information manually.

I hope this information is useful

 

[rfeenie]

is there a cd-rom or any other device running on the same IDE cable as the hard drive ? is yes, remove and try If in doubt get the Ball Pein Hammer out