Originally Posted by Chozart

Screwdriver. Take floppy out of mom's computer. Use floppy. Stick floppy back into mom's computer

Originally Posted by cometman

ok well i didnt want to do that because its a 9 year old dell xps and it's big, clunky and weighs about 50 pounds lol. My friend did it for me though while i wasnt there, but i tried to create a bootable floppy from the dell it was in (windows xp), stuck the floppy drive in the problem computer with the floppy in it and it wont boot into dos. All it does is say 'disk i/o error. replace disk then press any key' like there's nothing on the floppy. I hooked it back up to the dell and created the disk again and got the same thing. I also tried putting the files from the created boot floppy disk on my flash drive and still got the same message. i tried to hook it up to my friends vista machine, but his mobo didnt have a fdd connection.
so i'm pretty much out of options here. I guess i will just rma the mobo since i know the ram, gpu, hdd and psu are all ok. Wish the board had a bios flash utility in the bios

Originally Posted by noobdown

surprised no one asked this, but what are the codes on the bsod?

Originally Posted by cometman

I built a computer for one of my friends a little while ago and has been running great up till now. He said he ran Hitman pro and told the computer to shut down after it was done. When he woke up the next morning it had a bsod on it and wont boot windows. We tried to boot different recovery discs and Vista discs to get it running again, but after it gets done with the "Windows is now loading files" it blinks the cursor in the top left once and then nothing happens, just a black screen. Sometimes it does the blue screen. Ive tried taking out one of the sticks of ram and that helped it progress to let only one specific recovery discs boot, but it says its not compatible even though we've used it before. When i try to use a fresh recovery cd (this is vista x64 btw) that i just burned on a different computer it boots just fine, but not on the problem computer. When we try to setup a new windows installation, it takes a really long time with the 'expanding files' process. I let it sit for a while and came back to yet another black screen. I ran diagnostics on all the hardware but everything checked out. I tried resetting the CMOS a few times, moving the stick of ram to a different slot, swapping the stick of RAM w/ the other one.

SO, the problem is we can't get recovery cd to boot, vista wont load a new setup, and diagnostics come up with nothing. Suggestions?

Originally Posted by The Duke

BSOD, frustrating...
Is he getting a BSOD or a BSOD