Ok, so last night at 5 to 5, typically, our general manager's PC had a bit of a fit, the mouse locked up and stopped working, so she decided to reboot the computer. However, when she turned it back on, she got the a non-system disk error.
There are a few issues that could have caused this. I'm going to start with what the issue actually was and then work my way through other possibilities.
Because the PC decided to give up at 5 to 5 we felt it would be best to leave it overnight to then work on it this morning. When we got in this morning we switched the PC on and wahey! It actually booted up without complaining about the disk not being present. What it did do, however, was say that there had been a recent hardware change and a new hard drive had been put in the PC. Now as we hadn't swapped the hard drive out the only logical conclusion was that it had somehow forgotten that the hard drive was already in there and so thought the hard drive was new. This lead us to the conclusion that the BIOS battery was possibly on its way out, and so when it had locked up and the PC had been restarted it totally forgot all of it's settings and that was why it couldn't see the hard drive. We took the old battery out and put a new one in, set the time and date settings, and the computer booted up no problem. So it was a really simple solution.You'll know if the BIOS battery in your PC is dying because it will lose any BIOS settings, including where to see the hard drive. If you switch your PC on and need to set the time and date settings again that will be because the BIOS battery has lost settings. Putting a new battery in the PC is a quick and easy job, and you won't lose any data on your PC.
Before we booted the computer up and worked out the problem was the BIOS battery we considered a couple of other problems.
Because this computer has had a history of switching itself on and off my first thought was that the problem may have been caused by the power supply. or the extension lead that the power supply was plugged into. Occasionally if a power supply is not powerful enough to power a computer (I think I used the word power far too many times in that sentence), the computer will periodically shut down, because obviously there would not be enough power getting to the motherboard in order to keep the computer running. Generally, if you haven't put anything extra in the computer yourself, and your using the build the computer came with, this shouldn't be a problem, as the computer manufacturer will have put the correct power supply into the PC. If you have built your own PC, or added any extras into a PC that you have bought, you will need to ensure that the power supply you are using is the right one. The best way to work out what kind of power supply you need is to add the wattage of all of the components together, and add 30%.This will give you adequate power to run the PC.
If you are using a standard build PC and it is still shutting down without warning, and you've confirmed that it isn't a BIOS issue, it may be the plug socket/extension lead that you have the PC plugged into. For example, if you have a PC, monitor, TV and games console plugged into one extension lead and they are all on at the same time (believe me I've known people to have a PC and games console running at the same time plugged into the same extension lead) it could be that the PC is not receiving enough power from the socket because it is being shared out to other devices. The easiest way to remedy this is to turn off and unplug anything you are not using, or plug your PC into a different socket. This should ensure that enough power gets to the PC.
Another idea we considered was simply that the hard drive had died, because occasionally this does happen. Partitions get corrupted, motors fail, power failures in the PC can cause corruption (which is what we thought might have happened) or a virus can corrupt the hard drive. Unfortunately once a hard drive has failed, the only viable option is to replace it. You should always ensure that all data is backed up regularly so that if your hard drive does fail you don't lose too much data. You should also make a recovery disk so that if your hard drive does fail (all of them do eventually) you can easily reinstall your operating system onto a new hard drive from the recovery disk, and if all of your information is backed up you can easily restore that too!
So, there are a few common hardware problems that may effect the day to day running of your computer system, and a few ways to solve them. Remember if you do plan on opening your computer case you need to make sure that you use an anti-static wrist strap, or discharge any static energy by touching a metal portion of the case.
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