Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with booting

Boot from USB DVD drive? How?

dougunderscorenelso — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:47:51 -0800

Making a Hackintosh out of an EEE PC, but failing on the first step (booting from an external USB drive). What am I doing wrong? So I bought a 900HA EEE PC thinking, "I am a relatively technically adept person, and I should be able to turn this into a hackintosh with little trouble." And I was wrong on both counts.

People with the same machine refer to this post's instructions, but I'm perpetually stuck on the first two steps due to issues with the external DVD drive.

Updating the BIOS with Alt-F2: When doing this, the DVD device whirs and searches briefly, but the system tells me "900HA.ROM not found." But it's on the DVD (and CD, once), and if I put the same file on a USB stick and update from THERE, it works. So this step is sooooort of complete, yet stil symptomatic of my problem.

Booting from the Boot-132 disk: Went into BIOS with F2, set the boot order to DVD-drive-first, and restarted. Nothing: the device doesn't even spin, and the machine boots straight into Windows, every time. If I try to use a USB stick with the Boot-132 image, it tells me it's not a system disk, which is apparently the reason this step requires I boot from a DVD/CD drive.

Has anyone had similar problems booting from an external DVD drive on any machine? I'm pretty sure the issue isn't the drive, because I've tried two fairly different drives with identical results.

Mac busted?

djgh — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 07:12:21 -0800

Is my Macbook's HD broken? Unable to boot, more details inside. I can't get my Macbook (black, OSX Tiger) to boot. I got the flashing question mark. Booted from the install disk, and Disk Utility and Startup Diak apps were unable to see my internal drive. Reset PRAM, following Apple's online troubleshooting guide, then went back to Disk Utility, which was still unable to see my drive. HD is making funny noises - am I right to assume that this is a hardware failure?

Other relevant info - I recently installed a new battery.

How to detriple-ize my triple-boot system without hosing my beloved partition.

Bondrake — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:43:21 -0800

What do I need to do to go from a triple-boot Ubuntu/Vista/XP system to only an XP system without destroying XP? So I initially set my system up with Windows XP. Then I got Vista 64 bit and also wanted to play around with Ubuntu, so I installed them basically following the procedure outlined here: http://lifehacker.com/software/ubuntu/hack-attack-how-to-tripleboot-windows-xp-vista-and-ubuntu-193474.php

Now I find myself never using 64-bit Vista due to some compatibility issues with programs I frequently use and with no need for Ubuntu. I would like to erase the partitions for Vista and Ubuntu to reclaim the space and boot directly into my XP partition. I also want to avoid hosing my XP setup though.

SO my question is: if I erase the Vista and Ubuntu partitions, then boot into recovery on with my XP disk and use fixmbr will I have a properly booting system? If not, what do I need to do in addition to or in place of these steps?

Help! I can't boot Windows XP and need help with the Recovery Console

riz1 — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 14:10:27 -0800

Help! I can't boot Windows XP and need help with the Recovery Console I've been trying to boot my Windows XP laptop and when I do I get the message:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:

\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM

You can attempt to repair this file by starting Windows Setup using the original Setup CD-ROM. Select r at the first screen to start repair.

So I found my Windows XP disc and started up the recovery console. First off, it doesn't give me the chance to select a Windows installation logon to (i.e., it doesn't prompt me for a password). This negates a lot of the possible fixes I've read about.

I tried running bootcfg /scan and I got the following error:

Failed to sucessfully scan disks for Windows installations. This error may be caused by a corrupt file system, which would prevent Bootcfg from sucessfully scanning. Use chkdsk to detect and disk errors.

Note: This operation must complete succesful in order for the /add or /rebuild commands to be uitlized.

When i use chkdsk i get the message: The volume appears to be in good coniditon and was not checked.

So i use option p to check the volume anyway. And it runs. I try running botocfg again and I get the same error!

Help! I have no clue what's going on. I don't mind writing over my old stuff, but I don't even know how to do that. Any help would be really appreciated.

Cannot Boot into XP or Grub

bloodniece — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 09:22:14 -0800

How do I recover Windows XP Pro boot record (MBR)? Scenario: Partitioned HD for Linux, Rebooted in XP ok, Reboot, install Linux and grub, reboot no Grub or XP. Ran XP Disc - Recovery Console (see extended explaination) Partitioned with Partition Magic HD for Linux.
Rebooted, Installed Linux (Debian) and grub.
Reboot --> no XP or Grub (no operating system found)
Rebooted with XP install disc, Ran Recovery Console
Ran these commands:
C: CD ..
C: ATTRIB –H C:\boot.ini
C:ATTRIB –S C:\boot.ini
C:ATRIB –R C:\boot.ini
C: del boot.ini
C: BOOTCFG /Rebuild
C: CHKDSK /R /F
C: FIXBOOT C: (had to do this since it tried to write a boot record to the partition I made for Linux E:, which I placed after C:)
No XP or Grub after reboot.
P.S. I even tried fixmbr to no avail.

I know, I know, get a Mac...

Heminator — Tue, 23 May 2006 07:38:18 -0800

Computer Won't Boot -- needless to say [MI]: I apologize up front if this question is a bit redundant w/r/t other AskMeFi questions I saw, but I'm greatly in need of advice/reassurance.

My Win XP PC worked fine as of last evening; it was shut down properly. This morning my Fiance tried to turn it on I was in the bathroom, I came out and saw a Blue Disc repair screen checking the disk for errors (This is not the first time this has happened; at the time I was concerned though not especially worried). I walked out of the room and came back. It wasn't loading. I saw that my Fiance had turned on my computer without unplugging my iPod and this halted the OS from loading.

I unplugged the iPod and it started to load. It got as far as the win logo screen with the progress bar-- then the screen went black and my monitor flashed an "INPUT MODE NOT SUPPORTED" message I had never seen before. It starts the booting process over at this point and will do so indefinitely unless I turn it off/uplug.

I tried starting in safe mode, debugging mode and last known good configuration. XP still won't load.

What can I do? My computer was buit for me and I do not have the installation XP discs, assuming that's the problem... Will Geek Squad have the necessary repair discs if I shell out a hundred bucks for them to show up at my apartment?

For bonus points, if I burn a linux live CD will that allow me to plug-in an an external hard drive via USB and rescue my files that way? (I have around 100 GB of stuff to recover).

Thanks in advance...

Does booting often hurt my computer?

visual mechanic — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 21:02:11 -0800

Does booting a computer often lower its life expectancy? I just did the boot camp xp and osx process on my macbook pro. I have 1 application that is windows only that I use once a day. it now occurs to me that I will be booting my laptop at least twice a day to run that software, whereas I used to boot my macs once a week.

Will this cause my hardware to fail more quickly? I've always loved how long my macs last. If it will hurt the computer, I'll switch to a virtualization solution like Parallels.

How can I get my PC to boot after a sleeper virus?

zaelic — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 04:16:00 -0800

I got virused (a wininit.exe problem) on my computer about ten days ago, and after I thought I had cleaned it, it seems to have zapped me with a sleeper program and now I can't boot to windows, even in Safe Mode. Help! The virus was originally a Tspy_ALEMOD.A that came with a bunch of search toolbars. I ran HijackThis, Spybot, AdAware, and then online checked with Panda scan and with Symantec;s Trend Micro, which found and deleted 6 viruses, but could not delete the Tspy-ALEMOD_A found in Windows/System/WININET.DLL.

I use Windows 98 SE, and I have had problems with using Firewalls, because I am connected as a slave machine to a computer (Windows 2000 XP) that has a strong firewll and Norton, and was not affected at all.

Much googling later, I thought I had been able to replace the infected wininet.dll by using "restore" function in my Control Panel add/remove programs box. I was suspicious thgough,because there seemed to be some bugginess when I was running certain programs.

This morning when I try to turn on the PC,it gets through running the initail boot sequence, and then, instead of going to the windows startup wallpaper prior to starting it simply says C:/WINDOWS/WININET.EXE than C:/ and then a line with a bunch of random (?) letters. Within five seconds it tells me it is now safe to turn my computer off. Can't get it to start Safe mode, either. Was able to run Command prompt with a floppy and a CD, though.

I was able to run scandisk using my Floppy startup disk, and I have the original Windows 98 CD in the drive. ANyway I can get this old warhorse running? I suspect I would have to replace a corrupted wininit.dll via dos or something, any advice?

Vaio's BIOS seems hosed.

daksya — Mon, 23 May 2005 10:51:02 -0800

My roommate's Sony Vaio PCG-F590 notebook, has had a peculiar problem for a couple of years now. In short, BIOS doesn't recognise the HDD, but only for the purposes of booting. One fine day, a couple of summers back, my roommate powered on his computer, only to find a solitary "Operating System Not Found" message, with no recognizable cause or trauma. The way to get around this is to insert any bootable CD, and do nothing while "Press Any key to boot from CD" flashes across, after which it properly boots from the HDD. Yesterday, I decided to fix this, since he wanted to reformat the drive anyway. After reformatting, I did a 'fdisk /mbr' and then reinstalled XP. No change. So, I checked the BIOS for the boot sequence. It shows,

1)ATAPI cd...
2)Diskette drive
3)Diskette drive

and that's it. The Diskette drive presumably refers to the 3.5" floppy drive it has. Note that the hard drive is recognized elsewhere in the BIOS(Primary slot). I experimented with giving priority to the 2 Diskette drive entries. No luck. So, I flashed the BIOS to the latest version, from the Sony site. No change in the entries.
When I booted using Ultimate Boot CD 3.3, and selected "Boot from 1st Hard Drive" --> no problem.

This seems to be some sort of BIOS glitch, but which the new BIOS hasn't resolved. Any clues?