[Viscera]

Hi, I am posting on several different forums to see if anyone can diagnose my friends problem here.

okay so my friend built a computer about four years ago, he usually keep the computer on for days/weeks. Just recently he purchased a new hard drive. It was working fine for a week or two, and apparently he turned off all of the start up programs for some reason (ill get back to specifics if reasons are needed to diagnose) and after rebooting it brought him to the menu asking whether to boot in safe mode or normal mode and after the countdown finishes it brought him to a blue screen saying "physical memory dump". And every time he boots the pc it just goes in a cycle of rebooting (in the same fashion). So since he cant even format his hdd he decided to format his hard drive at my house using my older computer since his plugs for the hdd is different on my newer pc, successfully formatting and installing windows (could installing windows on the spot be a possible problem?) and plugged it back in his computer. it starts up to the screen that asks you if you want to start up in safe mode or normal but the keyboard doesn’t work, so he simply replaced the keyboard which ended up working up to the bios screen, and it just reboots from that screen again. So he is wondering if its a motherboard problem, is it fried? Would his motherboard even function or show the power lights if its fried? Or is something else the problem? Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Baez]

You can't install a copy of Windows on any computer other than the one it is going to run on in the first place. He needs to first use the Windows CD and perform a Windows repair installation on his own computer.

[Viscera]

of course, thats what we tried first but same result, it just reboots on the screen that asks to choose if he wants to start in safe mode or normal, so we thought we had no choice but to to what we did. So is his computer pretty much finished? or are there ways to repair that problem in the situation that hes in.

[Baez]

You need to do a few diagnostics first before saying the computer is dead. Download SeaTools and MemTest and burn each on two separate CD's. Boot from the MemTest CD first. Run that for at least 8 hours and see if it passes. Then boot the SeaTools CD and run the long hard drive test. See if that passes. SeaTools checks and repairs non-Seagate drives as well so if the drive isn't seagate don't worry.

[Viscera]

alright cool, thanks ill give it a try