PCTech Forums

Hey everyone,

I have a problem with my E Machine that has really been driving me crazy. Yesterday our power went out in my apartment for about 3 hours and later that night, when I went to turn it on, I couldn't see to get past the starting screen. It will come on and just get stuck right there. I figured maybe a boot disk would help but I don't have one. But I did hear that if you have another PC you can make a boot disk?

I'd be really grateful for help with this problem.

Hello triciee04, and welcome to our forum.

There are many things that could be causing your problem both hardware and software.
I'm going to up front and tell that this does not sound good and could very well be hardware failure.

What you really need is a Windows XP cd but I know that most people don't have one.

Boot Disks:
You can download the boot disks setup files from Microsoft .
You will need to know the what version of Windows you are running:
Windows XP Home
Windows XP Pro
Windows XP Home SP2
Windows XP Pro SP2

You can also download a XP Quick Boot Diskette set from (make sure to read the readme first.)

There is a chance that's it's just a damaged master boot record on the hard drive.
In that case I would recommend the microsoft disk set as you can use the fix MBR option to repair the master boot record.

Used the disk and it did the trick. Thank you very much.