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sentia not booting up

post #1 of 12
11/24/06 at 8:05pm
Thread Starter 
i have the older sentia with the 12.1 screen and it took a fall recently and when i try to boot it up i get the AW logo screen, then it tells me windows failed to load properly and i have the safe mode options and whatnot, no matter what option i choose it will go to the windows load screen then it will put a blue screen up for not even 1/10 th of a second and it starts thes loop all over agian. any one have any ideas on whats going on? id really like to fix it.
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post #2 of 12
11/24/06 at 10:44pm
Sounds like serious trouble!!!!

The fact that it doesnt fail until the windows screen indicates a hard drive problem. try a reformat/reinstall, try to boot linux off a usb drive, or replace the notebook harddrive. thats ur first steps, if those dont fix the problem ur in real trouble because any of the problems u could possibly fix without tossing the laptop usually manifest their problems differently.

Blue screens often occur b/c of memory corruptions, also try reseating ur ram, testing a module at a time in different slots too.
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post #3 of 12
11/28/06 at 10:45pm
Thread Starter 
yeah i tried resetting the ram mo ving it to the other slot. even a different stick. nothing. i also tried resetting the hdd and nothing. ill install linux on my external drive and give it a shot. ill report back once i do that.

also is there a way i can reformat a drive myself? i dont want to take it anywhere to have it done. most of the computer shops around here charge for it.
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post #4 of 12
11/28/06 at 11:51pm
dl a bootable cd like partition magic (hacked)
there are prolly free ones too

oh yeah, dl knoppix, burn to disc and see if ur comp runs off the live distro.
That should be the 1st!!!! thing u do, knoppix has disk partition utilities but so does windows install disk!!!
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post #5 of 12
11/30/06 at 12:00am
Thread Starter 
ok i downloaded knoppix and some other partition management programs and put them all onto disks using nero. i put them in my drive to run and it just goes off my hardrive like always. i even went into bios and changed to boot priority to do cd/dvd first. nothing. maybe im not doing something right?
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post #6 of 12
11/30/06 at 6:12am
couple things, u sumtimes have to burn discs as *bootable, but any .iso like knoppix should burn just fine. Second, it sounds odd, if u set dvd as first boot device u should definitely hear and see the drive spin up witha disc in before it gets to hdd period usually sumtimes with a dos prompt "do u want to boot cd?..." or such that last 3-4 seconds. If this is not the case I would double check your bios settings that you have correctly enabled the boot order, the only way I can think of this feature failing is b/c your bios battery is dead and therefore resets to hdd 1st boot device when u save and exit out of bios.... but even then u should get some king of cmos checksum error or such. does the cd boot priority persist or does it return to hdd everytime u check it? other than that Im running out of advice/options.... If you can get to a boot failure of windows you *should be able to try to boot knoppix....????
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post #7 of 12
11/30/06 at 6:42pm
Thread Starter 
every time i enter the bios my previous setting were saved so i think its ok..

i stuck a pirate version of XP(i have no idea where mine is) in and i got it to ask me if i want to boot from a disk and then got an error. i burnt it and knoppix with the same program the same way so i dont know why i cant get knoppix to go for me. ill try messing with it in an hour or so.
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post #8 of 12
11/30/06 at 7:43pm
Thread Starter 
ok i got knoppix to boot somehow heh. it loads up linux and i have an interface. i clicked a few things and it froze up on me. where are the partition utilities at and what steps shold i take to erase my hard drive and format it to the point where i can install windows.
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post #9 of 12
11/30/06 at 11:57pm
I would test knoppix some more, see if u can isolate a cuause to the lockup, knoppix will use free space on a hdd to as a temp storage that it deletes when it quits I think, maybe not, remove your hard drive aand rerun knoppix and see if it still locks up, then try the ram swapping game/technique with knoppix, if it still happens Im afraid your motherboard is hosed, cuz bad ram will usually result in a BSOD......
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post #10 of 12
12/1/06 at 12:27am
Thread Starter 
i played with knoppix for a while. cool program. well any way i used a program called super fdisk and i erased and recreated my partition. im installing windows now. thanks for the help and good thing i still have all my drivers and utilities cds from aw.
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post #11 of 12
12/1/06 at 4:36pm
I would try to find and fix the problem before you start doing mission critical work on it again.
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post #12 of 12
12/1/06 at 6:19pm
Thread Starter 
i think there is something wrong with my hdd. on start up it did a disk check and replaced about 30 minute worth of bad clusters. i may just buy a new hard drive.
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