Evo 610c Madness

[internetdemon]

This has really got me stumped; but here goes.

 

Ive installed Windows XP Professional on a 2nd Hand (ebay) Compaq Evo 610c laptop using the recovery discs that came with it. All works fine, until I shut it down and take the power cable out - when it boots with a "Non system disk or disk error", and the hard drive is seemingly blank.

 

Ive noticed the battery does not charge, and the BIOS clock thinks its 1980, but I've never heard of a hard drive nuking itself when you remove the power.

 

Has anyone else heard of this or had it happen to them?

[tech_guy]

Laptop battery & CMOS battery both la-la by the sound of it?!

[kmount]

Interesting..

 

I can only summise it's trying to boot from something that isn't bootable due to the loss of boot settings. Perhaps a recovery partition that isn't directly bootable or so.

 

Would be worth ripping the hdd out to see if it still does it or not.

[srochford]

When you say "hard drive is seemingly blank" are you looking at it with a Boot CD or similar? If not, can you check to see if the partition is just not "active" - if it isn't then it won't boot, even if all the other files are present.

[internetdemon]

Ive managed to boot the machine from a BarPE disc, all the new windows files are there on the hard drive. Just looks like its failing to boot from it.

 

Looks like the CMOS battery being dead is the cause. Im making a DOS CD to check the partitions now...

[internetdemon]

Problem solved! It was the CMOS battery that was flat.

They are a pain to get hold of the right replacement ones though, soo many different code numbers :S