Hi Guys. I have had my pc for about a year and a half now but recently I have been having some troubles with it.

1) If I disconnect the computer from the power supply for a long period of time, when I go to turn the computer back on it will sometimes not respond until I have left the plug on for a while first before pressing the power button.

2) Occasionally the computer would start to boot up and then it would show a screen saying "Reboot and select proper boot device. Or insert boot media in selected device and press any key.". which I can usually get around by leaving it on this message for about half hour and then rebooting.

3) Now when I currently try to turn the PC on it will do 1 of either 2 things. It will either do what I described in 2). OR it will get past the motherboards splash screen and then just display a black screen half filled with the number 99 printed everywhere.


To me this sounds like a hard drive problem and perhaps I should think about investing in a new hard drive. Or perhaps the power supply is some how screwed up. But I would definitely like a second opinion since I can not afford to replace my hard drive and I have grown very accustomed to the current state of my typically working hard drive.

Start by replacing the CMOS battery for the PC.
See #2 in Pete's sticky post here:
http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=25502

Then if the problem is still there...

Try booting some Operating System off some disk other than the HDD, to see what the result is.
e.g.
DOS [or some DOS program] off a bootable floppy.
AND/OR...
Knoppix off a bootable Linux live CD.

Surely if there were a problem with my cmos bettery then my bios time/date settings would be wrong. But they are 100% correct!


Also I do not have a floppy drive/msdos floppy disk booter/ cdrom OS boot up disk.

Is there anything else I can do to try and pin point down the problem with my computer? I noticed in the bios that full accurate details relating to the hard drive on my problematic computer were viewable, which leads me to believe there is nothing wrong with my hard drive. Perhaps my boot up files have become corrupt in some way.

I just found the following page...

http://notpopular.com/blogs/josh/2006/02/23/l-99-99-99-99-99-99-99-99-99-99-99-99-99-99-99-99-99-99-99/

.. it suggests that my bootfile is most likely corrupt and that I should insert the windows xp disk, start the repair console and then run the fixmbr command! I will report back here if it works (will take me a few days to get hold of a windows xp disk).