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[Ricky]

yes, i think i might have killed my computer. just about an hour ago, it started thundering and lightning. so i decided to get off, moreso, rushed by my parents to get off. i turned off the deskto by hitting the "ON" buttong, y'know, the little "O-" on the tower. the raining stopped, so i decided to go back on to play games. so i turned it on and left the room to let it load. i come back about 15 minutes later, and no it does not take 15 minutes for my computer to load, and it was still on the inital startup screen, which has the  <ESC:BOOT MENU> <F10:STARTUP MENU> <F1:SYSTEM RECOVERY>. usually it loads without having to hit one of those options, i tried, but it didnt work. after awhile, i looked to see if my keyboard was working by hitting caps and seeing if the light came on, it didnt. it's also worthy to mention that all this time the tower was humming continiously.



if anyone has any ideas, or any suggestions, or needs anything else to be stated, plesae do so, because i'm pretty sure pops isn't too pleased

side note: does turning off the computer via tower really cause harm to the computer, or is it just some geeky wives' tale?

[Argembarger]

I've never had problems arise from hard-crashing the computer, aside from the obvious loss-of-saved-data, and it's really bad to do if you're in the process of changing system settings or updating/installing/uninstalling something.

Keep trying, maybe? Do you have a recovery disk?

[Ricky]

ehm, i just found the recovery disc withg scratches widers than wide...

[ein]

The first thing you need to do is check for hardware issues.
Open that sucker up and see if any of the ports are fried, or circuits blown, etcetera.
If all's well on that end, without a recovery disk, pretty much all you can do is install a new operating system.
You may have to go into BIOS to allow it to boot from a disk (that F10 option).

[ed boy]

If your recovery disk is in a bad way, burn another one of someone else's computer.

[Tellemurius]

hard crashing your computer does VERY slight damage to your hardware but only to the ram chips and the hard drive due to memory genecide, normally a computer can live through 30,000 poweroffs, software crashing and hard crashing (yes even turning off your computer damages it, wierd eh?).

[Argembarger]

If your recovery disc is too scratched to function, you can always try buffing out the scratches. What do you have to lose?

Take some toothpaste and a cloth, put a dab of toothpaste on the scratch, and wipe it (make sure you only wipe from the inside and outside of the disk, never wipe clockwise/counterclockwise)

The grit in the toothpaste will turn the big scratch into a lot of tiny microscratches

But microscratches aren't a big deal at all and your computer should be able to read the data through them without issue.

At least, it works for me. Your mileage may greatly vary.

I only recommend this option if the CD is scratched enough to justify throwing it away.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Are you using a usb keyboard? Last time I checked, not all (if any) BIOSes detected usb keyboards. Dig out one of your older keyboards and test that.

[Ricky]

well, the issue of the computer is now solved!i'm not sure exactly how... but it's solved!



i was farting around with it, trying to see what was wrong(like i would actually know), so i unplugged the usb mouse from the front of the tower. it left the startup screen, and went to the login screen.



could a usb mouse potentially caush a computer to stop working?

[Virex]

It was probably trying to boot from the mouse, leading to the following (imaginary) conversation:


PC: Hey a USB device, let's see if I can boot from it
PC: Hello, can you boot me up?
Mouse: Wha? what's booting?
PC: can you boot me up?
Mouse: sorry dude don't know how to.
PC: can you boot me up?
Mouse: dude...
PC: can you boot me up?
mouse: Listen I don...
PC: can you boot me up?
Mouse STOP HARASSING ME YOU PIECE OF FAULTY HARDWARE
PC: can you boot me up?
Mouse Argggg*squee*

[Ephemeriis]

Yep.  USB stuff can definitely stop the boot process.

Had a call once with a computer that wouldn't boot...  Turned out it didn't like the USB keyboard.  Remove the keyboard and it would boot fine.  Plug the keyboard in again once it was up and it would work fine.  That was a fun one to troubleshoot.

[ILikePie]

Had the same problem with an old sd card reader, my computer just wouldn't boot with it connected.

[dragonshardz]

This is why you should set your BIOS to boot from HDD first, then CD/DVD, then USB.

[Virex]

Erm, no. If there's something wrong with your hard disk you'll want to have a way out. At least keep CD/DVD on top. That way if a part of your disk becomes corrupted that is needed to boot your pc up you can at least use a CD to boot it and try to restore your disk to working order or ship your data to an external HD or something.

[Ephemeriis]

I usually set my HDD to boot first, just so I don't have to wait the few seconds it takes my machine to figure out there's nothing in the floppy/optical/USB to boot off of.

But, honestly, that shouldn't matter.  With the exception of floppy disks, which will be treated as boot media even if there's nothing usable on them - leading to errors.  And some old machines that did the same thing to USB disks - leading to errors.  Most computers are able to deal with non-bootable media on USB ports.  I routinely boot machines with a USB key attached, and them set to boot from USB if available, with no trouble at all.

The problem isn't that there's no boot files on the USB - you can't have boot files on a keyboard anyway.  The problem is that there's something wrong with that USB device and it's sending garbage back to the computer.  Turning off USB boot won't fix that.