Hello last night I had a bit of trouble with my pc. I own a packard bell and last night when I turned it on it came up on the screen boot to cd as normal but then it came up twice and the comp wouldnt boot. I left it for a while and it stil didn't. Again I left it for another 5 mins and then it did. This has happened a couple of times a few months ago but it stopped and I never thought any more of it. I unplugged my modem and power cable last night and this morning I put them back i and booted the comp up and she worked fine. What is the cause of this?

thanks

Hello Prankster

Welcome to PC Help Forum

Were there any error messages shown at the time?

Also can you explain what you mean by "boot to cd as normal" please.

No error messages. After the 'click f3 for bios, f8 for boot order etc' screen there is a black screen with the words 'Boot to cd'. This always comes up then the comp proceeds to boot to windows. As I said this is normal except for the problem which arose last night...

I have a feeling this is a hard drive issue but anyway press F8 and change the boot order to the hard drive first making sure you save the setting then get back to us if this issue continues.

I just don't understand. Since I have had my pc (2 years now) its always came up boot to cd, as this was the default setting isn't this normal? I don't want to go change it now and maybe muck it up more. Can you elaborate more on why you think its a hard drive issue?

Do you have a bootable CD in the Cd drive? If you do, remove it (in fact remove any CD in there) re-boot and see if the problem occurs.

Prankster

In the old days when machines had floppy drives the default boot order would be;

Floppy
Cdrom
Hard drive

When you boot up the machine looks for an operating system that is present on any of those devices by first trying the floppy, cdrom etc until it finds boot files.

Sometimes people would leave a disk in the floppy drive that was not bootable and then would receive an "NTLDR is missing" error.

If you change the boot order to the hard drive first then the computer immediately sees boot files and loads up, it also saves time by not looking at the other devices.

This is what Hengis is saying.