Hello everyone. I have come to these forums in an act of desperation as I desperately seek answers to my computer woes. I arrived home yesterday afternoon from my school and turned on my PC, only to encounter a series of serious problems. This is what happened; I should have an instant mini OS splash screen type thing when I first boot up called Express Gate, which has a 10 second timer before booting windows XP and various other choices such as Skype etc. This programme attempted to boot up, indicated by a blank screen for a while then saying something along the lines of "Express Gate is not installed on your drive blah blah blah", which gave me the impression my problem may lie in my hard drive. When the 10 second timer reached 0, it would have continued with the booting process, beginning with the BIOS splash screen, "AI something", however this process usually only took 1 or 2 seconds, instead it takes about 30 seconds. Next, there is usually a black screen for a brief period before the Windows XP loader appears, but instead just gives me an error along the lines of " Cannot locate drive to boot, please allocate a drive and select its location" or something. Heres some brief details of my rig. Windows Xp 64 bit edition (5.2, build 3790) Intel Pentium III Xeon processor (4CPUS) ~2.8 Ghz 4094MB RAM ATI RADEON HD4870 X2 (2GB Graphics memory in total) Running 1680X1050 resolution 1 TB Hard Drive Thats the best I can describe it. I'm really at a wits end with this problem. I'm studying digital creativity, heavily rely on getting work done at home on my computer and I'm a lousy student with an almost non existant source of income. I would really appreciate some help from you guys and look foward to hearing some of your suggestions as to what I should do. Today I plan on locating a 3.5 inch hard drive with a SATA cable to differentiate the source of the problem between the harddrive or the motherboard. Thank you for your time.
If i remember correctly, expressgate is installed onto your hard drive so if something is wrong with your hard drive / the controler on the motherboard then the BIOS would not be able to find it and would report it as not installed. If you can find another hard drive with an operating system on it you should be able to find out fairly quickly (but remember that it won't have expressgate installed on it). Most hard drives have some sort of manufacturers warrenty, so you might be able to get it replaced for the cost of the postage if it is faulty buttry your 1TB drive in another machine even if the borrorwed SATA drive works before returning it and make sure you package it well (if it arives with damage caused by postage they might not replace it).
