Blackout and no startup

[AMDCam]

Hey, my friend has a computer that isn't starting after a power outage. It actually starts up until half way through the Windows XP loading screen (the blue bars slide across the screen), then it goes blue screen for a split second and restarts. It looks like it's making a physical memory dump. The hard drive had the "hard drive failure is immenent" thing on there for a while, do you think something's wrong with the hard drive or RAM? I couldn't figure out why a blackout would cause damage to a computer. Yes there was a surge protector, but there was no surge I think. It doesn't look like it loses power, just looks like a loading thing. I tried the BIOS to see if I had to reset some settings in case it got reset, and so far that isn't any help. It is a newer computer, an Athlon XP with an AGP 8x motherboard and Nvidia Ti4200 128mb RAM card with 64mb of system RAM, I don't know who makes any of the components, I don't even know how fast the processor is. With the boot virus protection enabled (from BIOS) it doesn't recognize any virus, so I don't know what's wrong with it. If anyone can help please do.

[djbbenn]

Sounds like some files may of got corrupted or something. Can you get into safemode? Most of the time when you just cut the power to the computer it is the harddrive that gets damaged if any hardware got damaged. Surge is what cause other things to get the "suddened death syndrome". But try safemode first, thats what I would do, if you havn't already. Also If you can, try the HD in another computer and that will help narrow it down to what it could be.

-Dan

[nightelf84]

Did u say 64MB of system ram??!?!

[djbbenn]

Ya 64mb or ram for xp is not enought, you should have at least 128 bare minimum. Did this just start to happen after the power fail. Or did it ever happen before?

-Dan

[AMDCam]

Well yeah, it did used to start up. I know 64 isn't much, I'll probably give those guys one of my old sticks of RAM, but it is being recognized as 64 and I don't know what they used to have. could the RAM have somehow been corrupted? If safe mode doesn't work I'll probably bring the hard drive to my computer, save the files they want, and run a disk check on it to look for errors. I know that with this computer (mine), if you hit the restart when it's in the Windows XP loading screen, it always does a disk check and has plenty of errors. Oh, and do restarts like that hurt RAM?

[djbbenn]

You can't corrput ram, once it losses its power source it clear all the data in it. It could be damage by a power surge but its unlikely with a surge protector. Same as when you restart it clears the ram.

-Dan

[W1zzard]

you most probably got some data corruption .. try if you can make it into safe mode where you run a hdd check .. if not .. reinstall windows

[AMDCam]

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking but I'm not gonna reinstall windows for them, that will be a last resort. I'll just put it in my computer, use it as a secondary drive, back up the data just in case, and perform a thorough disk check to see where the corruption is. Then I'll go RAM, pop a stick of that in there if it still doesn't boot up, and if nothing works I'm gonna go ahead and reformat the drive and put the data back on it.

[Thermopylae_480]

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking but I'm not gonna reinstall windows for them, that will be a last resort. I'll just put it in my computer, use it as a secondary drive, back up the data just in case, and perform a thorough disk check to see where the corruption is. Then I'll go RAM, pop a stick of that in there if it still doesn't boot up, and if nothing works I'm gonna go ahead and reformat the drive and put the data back on it.

Try the RAM soon. I've used computers at school that are running XP with 64MB of RAM [insert sick face] and they are extremely unstable, and agonizingly slow.

In fact if there is even 128Mb of Ram, I would suggest installing Window 2000. If you have access to a copy of course.

[AMDCam]

Well like I said, it's not my computer, and these guys don't play games or even update their computer. Just very basic stuff, so going advanced and installing an old operating system they've never even used would be wierd. It would be cheaper to get my free RAM for them, and if mine's not compatible then they can buy PC2100 pretty cheap because of how old that RAM is.