A puzzler.

[Alan2273]

A friends wife brought their computer to my house, apparently it would beep at boot then start to load Windows XP Home, as the bar started going across it would just shut down.

The first thing I tried was to boot into safe mode, and exactly the same, after the writing scrolled up the screen it shut down.

I tried another graphics card, another HSF, tested the PSU and tried each memory stick seperately, non of these measures cured the problem.

So I asked Sandra if anything had been installed before this happened.

I was not prepared for the answer I got.

Apparently Richard had installed Saybayon Linux distribution on his second hard drive and decided he did not like it, so he uninstalled it through Windows using disk management and formatted the drive in NTFS.

Then when he rebooted the computer he got a screen saying that grub could not boot into the operating system.

So he got on his laptop and seached for an answer, which he tried, from the repair console he issued the commands fixmbr & fixboot.

Then when he rebooted, as soon as it got to the loading screen and the bar started going across it just kept shutting down.

I asked him to bring over his disks and did an XP repair install and half way through I got a cyclic redundancy error, so I gave the disk a wipe put it back in and away it went.

Everything is now up and running.

I have been using Linux and setting up dual boot computers for a couple of years now and have never seen this problem, which is why I thought it was a hardware related.

It just goes to show with computers you cannot take anything for granted.

[catgate]

I find Linux does make one slightly complacent...well at least Ubuntu does with me.