Like many others who have come before me, I walked into my office and found my computer with a blank (black) screen staring at me with the following message:
Intel UNDI, PXE-2.0 (build 082)
Copyright (C) 1997-2000 Intel Corporation
For Realtek RTL8139(X)/8130/810X PCI Fast Ethernet Controller v2.13 (020326)
CLIENT MAC ADDR: 00 13 D3 65 7F 25 GUID: FFFFFFFF-FFFF-FFFF-FFFFFFF
FFFFF
PXE-E53: No boot filename received
PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM.
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER
When I attempted to start (reboot) the computer, I continued to get the same black screen and the same message following each attempt.
Because I no longer have the recovery disk for this machine, using the advice from another tech group, I made a boot disk from the laptop I am using to post this message; which also runs Windows XP; however, the bad computer does not boot up from the cd I made (the cd drive light lights up momentarily; however, it then defaults to the same message as described above).
I can get to the BIOS CMOS Setup Utility Menu and on the Advanced BIOS Features Menu the Removable Device Priority has only one selection which is 1. Floppy Disks. The Network Boot Priority has only one selection which is 1. Network 0 : Realtek Boot Agen . The First Boot Device is [Hard Disk], Second Boot Device is [CDROM], third is [Removable], fourth is [Network]. On the Advanced Chipset Features menu, the UMA Frame Buffer Size is [128MB], System BIOS Cacheable is [Disabled], Auto Detect PCI Clk is [Disabled] and spread spectrum is [Enabled]
On the Standard CMOS Features screen there is [None] selected for all IDE channels; both Masters and Slaves (this doesnt seem right to me; but then Im a computer user, not a computer fixer). When I use the auto-detect feature, nothing seems to happen other than the brief message Detecting Hard Drive appears for a few seconds. Following this detection the Capacity, Cylinder and all other attributes for the drive are 0 . I was able to "auto detect" the first five IDE channels listed; however, the attempt to auto-detect the IDE channel 5 Slave "locked-up" at the "Dectecting Hard Drive" message and I had to "control-alt-delete" to get unlocked. Following the restart, I was able to Auto-Detect the remaining Channel 6 Master and Slave. I did note that the auto-detect on IDE Channel 6 Master, once auto-detected listed [TSSTcorpCD/DVDW] rather than the [None] that was listed prior to the auto-detect attempt.
I have verified that there are no USB devices connected such as a flash drive, camera, etc. I have also verified that all cables are connected to the hard drive and the motherboard. No hardware or software changes have been made in many months and I run a very active anit-virus software program. One last thought, I cannot get to a command prompt.
Note: I do have two hard drives installed in this machine. One is what came with the unit; which is the master. The second (slave) is one which I removed from an older machine simply to use as a data storage device. I assume it might be possible to switch these from master to slave and the slave to master and attempt to restart? Other than this, is there anything that I can I do to fix this?
