Guys/Gals,

This is slightly off TR topic but I know how talented everyone in here is so:

My friend’s desktop suddenly stop booting to XP.

Here are my diagnostics:
- When Booting Up it goes straight to the BIOS
- Exiting Bios:
  CPU speed is not read correctly (way lower than actual speed)
- Sometimes it will go as far “... PCI device listing ...” but will hang
- Most of the time will get the message:
  Keyboard error or no keyboard present but will hang

My conclusion is that BIOS is corrupted and needs to be upgraded but won’t boot from A: (primary boot sequence is A:).

It seems to read A: but nothing seems to happen.

Any clue? Help?

Hi,

Have you tried resetting the BIOS through the jumper—some motherboards have a jumper that you can move to reset (and then move back when you’re done)—I think some have the original BIOS backed up somewhere.

The only other thing that comes to mind is to try booting off maybe a bootable CD with the BIOS installer on it…

Cheers,
James

“Jumper - Clearing CMOS” That was my first attempt.
Also tried booting from my Boot DISK A and Boot CD.

... won’t just boot ...

Here’s the funny part ... I shutdown the PC (again ... 100th time) and restarted, all of a sudden I noticed that the CPU speed was correct again and a MIRACLE suddenly happened ... it booted to XP without me doing anything!  Seriously there is a God!!!

What scares me is that the problem might happen again.

Thanks for the help though

Arrgg ... it happened again.  I tried booting it 4 times and it booted nicely each time but when I started the PC this morning it happened again ...

Are you using a USB keyboard?  If so, try connecting the keyboard via the port (don’t know it’s exact name) and see if it is recognized.  That has happened to me a couple of times and it seems the USB just stops recoginzing the keyboard and windows will not load.

Have you tried booting with a different keyboard?

I did ... I tried all sorts actually: USB, & regular ...
any other suggestion?

A new motherboard.

MOB is not even a month old ... maybe it’s still under warranty…