Mystery Manor Adventure Forum

Back to email....

I got a reply back from PC Specialist on Monday, and this is what they said:-

"Hello Rozanne, That normally means it having trouble accessing the boot device, however, do you have an external hard drive or USB stick in the drive, it generally happens when there is a peripheral attached to the PC, unplug the peripheral and it should let you straight in."

Yup, I did have my EHD plugged in, and yup, everything is now hunky dory

Phew, I am just so relieved that is what the problem was!

Oh, my goodness! I thought this thread was talking about the other laptop that you were going to back up... Thank heavens, PC Specialist contacted you. I have a feeling they will provide good technical support should you need it. Was that why it wouldn't boot up correctly before?

EDIT: Moved these posts over to the Windows 7 laptop thread, so we all know Rosaboobie's new baby is back to full health!!

I don't have a clue about laptops, but have been following this thread and am so pleased that it's finally up and running.

Thanks, Drac - Sorry for the confusion, folks!

Maybe you should check the boot order in your BIOS. Ordinarily computers are set to boot off the internal hard drive before attempting to boot off an external drive.

I don't "do" BIOS, middletoe! I am not that clever.

I have unplugged the EHD and will just leave the settings as they are, but thanks for your input anyway.

Yup! If making sure the EHD is not plugged in when you boot up is the easiest, go for it. The BIOS is an interesting place and I go into mine often, but it can be a bewildering forest to the uninitiated! You would be temped to throw salt over your shoulder, light incense and give a burnt offering to the computer gods!

Oh my goodness, I am for sure not that brave! I leave the BIOS to you techies!

I exaggerated, Rosaboobie! But it is a place where you should tread carefully.

In my confused state, I won't even dare venture there!

It doesn't hurt anything to look.

Look, but don't touch, eh Jen?

Actually, it's a pretty interesting place to wander around... I'm anxious to use the new UEFI BIOS in the motherboard for my grandson's Christmas build present. The old BIOS uses the arrow keys and a few other keyboard strokes, but the new UEFI BIOS can be access from the operating system and you can use the mouse. Should be interesting.

Some of the BIOS is confusing, but some is not.
For example if you find a place for "disable onboard sound" you know what that would do.
And a place for "boot order" will tell your computer whether you'd want to boot off the CD instead of the hard drive if there is a CD in the drive. There should also be an option to boot off of a USB drive on modern computers, which may be the way yours is set if it tried to boot off your external drive instead of your hard drive.