Ron Jackson wrote:
Had a Power outage. Toaster overloaded and flipped a breaker while I
was on my computer Now when I power up, it shows the logo and
displays uniform vertical lines on the monitor. What happened??? It
used to be a Presario but replaced the mobo sometime about a year ago
with a zotac board. Running XP home. Don't know where to start.
Removed and replaced the battery, then stared at it for awhile.
Checked all the connections. Did the magic 'disconnect the power
cord and hold down the turn on button for ten seconds' trick which
has worked miraculously on all boot up problems before. Can anyone
give me a clue as what to do next? Have you any idea what it is like
to be bedridden without a computer?

Do you get beeps when you turn on the computer? If so, the mobo is
complaining about something and you need to count the beeps and look up the
beep code (one beep usually means POST is OK).

Does the computer do the POST (Power ON Self Test) ? If so, the motherboard
is probably OK.

Assuming the mobo is OK, can you boot from a bootable CD? Any bootable CD
is OK to try...Windows setup, Linux...whatever. Best to go into BIOS setup
and make the CD drive the first boot device though even if it is not that
way a CD should boot if the primary boot device doesn't (as long as the CD
drive is listed as a boot device).

If you can boot from the CD, it means that either the HD is toast or the OS
on it is. If you have another HD with an OS, you could try using it; if
not, you might try the XP repair console (on WinXP setup disc) and do FIXMBR
and FIXBOOT to repair boot info; if those don't help - or if you prefer -
you could try reinstalling Windows.

If the CD won't boot or if none of the last paragraph help, I would suspect
the power supply unit.

--

dadiOH
____________________________

dadiOH's dandies v3.06...
....a help file of info about MP3s, recording from
LP/cassette and tips & tricks on this and that.
Get it at http://mysite.verizon.net/xico