Help Needed!

[lePobz]

System:-

AthlonXP 3000+
Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe
Radeon 9800 Pro (128mb)
1024mb DDR333 (2x512 dual bw)
80GB WD Caviar HDD
DVD drive


Right, well the PC above *stopped working* .... that is, it was working fine, until one day it refused to boot up. Ever.

It gets as far as initialising the XP loader, and then reboots itself.

I'm sure it's a hardware error. I put the Knoppix CD in to see if it was just windows needing a boot sector refresh, but Knoppix can not get any data from the CD into the RAM (it gets I/O errors on every piece of data it tries to copy). I've tried different RAM dimms and a different CD drive, the same happens. I've refreshed the CMOS completely (one time I got a CMOS Checksum error??)

So, I'm led to believe this is a hardware failiure on the motherboard itself. Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[lePobz]

I've sorted it ... I flashed the bios and it started responding to CDs, so I put the XP CD in and repaired the boot sector. Still didn't work so I formatted, but everything seems fine now. I think it had a virus on it that corrupted the cmos and deleted/corrupted the boot sector. I'll have to firewall it and slap a heap of scanners on there before I give it back to him.

Atleast this time theres no need to replace hardware, which is always good