Fried?

[Serephino]

My computer won't start up!  I guess while I was gone we had a power surge or something.  I came home and went to turn it back on, forgetting that when it loses power like that a menu comes up.  I usually just tell it to start normally, but I guess since I stepped away it selected scan disk for me after so many seconds.

In stage 2 it did this long recovery list.  I couldn't tell you what it said because it streamed down the screen too fast.  Now it won't start.  I tried the recovery thing, but it just keeps trying to restart over and over again.  I can't even find a safe mode option.  I tried getting it to go to both bios and set up when it's starting up.  The screen will come up, but only stay there a minute before it tries to restart again.  I was forced to power up this crappy little netbook *cries*

[Ashleebabe]

Sam happened to me. Launch the recovery and you may have to do a system restore. Everything back to the factory settings. Its a pain in the butt but that is how I got my laptop to work

[Oreo]

You don't have a dvd in there do you? I had that cycle happen once and the pc kept trying to boot from the dvd instead of the HD. I kept getting an endless black screen of rebooting. :P I had to remove my flash drive too.

[Serephino]

I was wondering the same thing, so I tried to get into the setup to look.  That loaded only for a minute, then restarted.  It does the same if I go into the bios.  All the repair system does is try to detect and repair the problem.  I can't do anything.  My boyfriend called on his break and he thinks it might be the motherboard :(

[Autumn Sativus]

In my experience, when the motherboard goes, you don't get that far into booting. Will be interesting to find out the problem though.

My go-to tactic for most large issues is to try booting from a flash drive or DVD into a live distro like Linux to see if the issue is in the drive or the hardware.

[Nessy]

A fried motherboard probably wouldn't even start. I am wondering though if your machine is overheating. If that is the case, these days they are designed to shut-down before you do fry something and permanently damage it. You didn't say if it is a desktop or a notebook... I am wondering if one of your fans has shorted out, specifically if it is a desktop the the heatsink fan that handles the CPU heat.

[Serephino]

Now that he's home all he could do was reinstall windows.  It took a while, but seems to have worked.  He thinks some ram might've gotten fried.  We'll see.

[Autumn Sativus]

MemTest86 to check for fried ram.