This past Christmas I received a computer that my father-in-law built. It has been working fine until last week. I leaned over the tower and made sure that the USB cord for my speakers was plugged in. At that point my computer shut down and then restarted. While LOADING it SHOWS the screen for the motherboard and then flashes quickly to a screen that says "No hard disk detected." Then it flashes from that to a screen that says "Reboot and select proper boot device or INSERT boot media in selected boot device and press a key." I have asked some of my more knowledgeable friends and they have been unable to help. Any help is greatly appreciated.
OS: Windows XP
Hard Drive: Seagate SATADo you have an XP CD ? ?Yes I doBoot to the XP CD...
At the first PROMPT screen press R to load the Recovery Console...
Let it load fully and you will have a command prompt window.
At the prompt type in fixboot and hit Enter...
Remove the CD and re-boot.
If no joy-joy repeat the procedure above but this thime type in fixmbr and hit Enter...
You will recieve a warning...select Y to continue...
Again remove the CD and re-boot.

Bring us good news !I will try your suggestion tomorrow, unfortunately I have to go to work early in the morning. Hope that it works. Just out of curiosity what does fixmbr do.
Thanks again, will be back on tomorrow.Replaces the Master boot record with a fresh working version....I loaded the cd and typed fixboot into the prompt. It then told me "FIXBOOT cannot find the system drive, or the drive SPECIFIED is not valid." I then tried fixnbr and the c prompt just comes back up.Re-boot and see if fixboot works...
You have to remove the CD and re-boot after each step.Quote from: lmshott07 on May 08, 2009, 07:46:35 PM

This past Christmas I received a computer that my father-in-law built. It has been working fine until last week. I leaned over the tower and made sure that the USB cord for my speakers was plugged in. At that point my computer shut down and then restarted. While loading it shows the screen for the motherboard and then flashes quickly to a screen that says "No hard disk detected." Then it flashes from that to a screen that says "Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key." I have asked some of my more knowledgeable friends and they have been unable to help. Any help is greatly appreciated.
OS: Windows XP
Hard Drive: Seagate SATA