asking for a friend

[Toby B.]

A friend contacted me this morning, apparently their mother replaced the power button on a PC, no it's stuck on the automatic repair splash screen for the past 24 hours..

[Karlsweldt]

What type of PC, and what OS?
The power button should be momentary-contact, not push on/push off like a light switch.
The switch contact header on the proper front panel pins?
If the switch is the proper type, was power totally removed from the system while repairing?
Could be the BIOS battery is dying, and may need replacement and reset to default.
Hopefully, that 'automatic repair' process is not doing a factory default OS setup!
Could also have been a service update for the OS, and has access problems to the data.
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... 49d?auth=1

[Toby B.]

Newer Dell (about 5 years old)
Windows10 Home (guessing)

All I got for info was the message they replaced the power button and the above pic. The only scenario I can think happened was a short or some other electrical malfunction caused the OS to get hosed...

[Roach412]

couple options...

have they tried just hitting F8 and told it explicitly to start normally?

disconnect everything(including power from wall) and hold the power button in for at least 30 seconds or more. plug all back in and start again.

http://appuals.com/preparing-automatic- ... indows-10/

-Roach

[Toby B.]

ok so she took the advice given...

F8 had no effect so I am told...

She pressed F12 and memory test failed with error code 2000-0123.. Hard drive said to have passed..

I relayed the message that I need the tower in my hands if there is any chance of fixing it... hard to repair a pc via text, when the person on the other end is a newb..

[Karlsweldt]

The system should allow BIOS pages entry, if not then a problem on the motherboard or possibly the wrong header has the primary drive. That "preparing automatic repair" message indicates that a boot process has stalled at the hard drive initial read.
If BIOS entry is good, then set the boot order for an optical drive path as first option. Then try an optical disk which has the auto-run feature, or the OS install disk. If a boot to that, the motherboard should be good. If successful in reading the optical disk, should be a message "press any key to boot from CD-ROM" which you should respond to within 5 seconds.
Just hope it is not some form of "ransom ware" that has captured the system!

[Mr T]

Looks like something got 'knocked' on the repair (memory). Tell them to reseat all RAM modules and Video/PCI-e/PCI cards...

[Toby B.]

Looks like something got 'knocked' on the repair (memory). Tell them to reseat all RAM modules and Video/PCI-e/PCI cards...

its getting dropped off this weekend.. we shall see

[Toby B.]

well it gets into the autorepair process and endless loop of puking out error messages...

everything from bad memory headers, to spool issues, etc.. I told the owners daughter the best I can manage is pulling important stuff off the drive. I don't have the cash to dump into and hope I get paid.

and still no clear direction on what they want to do..