No access to machine. driver failure

Hi all. I'm having some problems with my uncle's machine.

it's a Shuttle XPC. smaller pcs that use a custom form factor. It's this one specifically: http://uk.shuttle.com/products/productsSpec?productId=470

about this machine specifically:
1.5 ghz athlon cpu
S3 graphics prosavage DDR (onboard video)
480 MB DDR1 ram
windows xp professional (SP3)

it's extremely far from state of the art, but it kind of chugs along.

i was trying to run minecraft on it, but I was getting errors about outdated video drivers, so i figured i'd try updating them. i downloaded and installed the vga drivers from there, and everything went pearshaped after a mandatory restart.

the computer now gives a bluescreen crash whenever it's attempting to start up, just after the main windows xp loading screen. the bluescreen doesn't stay there to read though, it flashes up for half a second and the machine restarts. i know there's a windows setting to change that but i can't access it right now.

I figured the next thing to do would be to boot in safe mode and rollback the driver. howeveer, i can't seem to get into safe mode at all. microsoft's advice about holding F8 as the computer is started (or rapidly tapping it) doesn't seem to work. perhaps the crash is happening before it's ready to choose a mode, but i dont think so. i've also tried pulling the plug on it at random to see if i can scare it into safe mode, but that's not working either. i've no idea why.

from here my next logical step would be to try external media. namely, a repair from the windows xp disk, or booting ubuntu. unfortunately i can't seem to boot from CDs either, because i can't access the bios menu to change boot settings. Like most computers you press del on the post screen to get there, but for some reason it's simply not working. when i press del, the screen goes black and nothing ever shows. i don't think this problem is related to the video driver, i was having it before. but i was able to access the bios menu about a week ago. the only thing i can think of that's changed since then,is that i replaced the cmos battery on the motherboard. could that cause an issue ?


anyways, at the moment i'm stuck. i can't think of any way to get access to the system, even to do a full wipe and reinstall. I do have access to another pc i'm using right now so i can download stuff as needed.

any ideas ?

 

Hello,
Your computer manual says that you can also try to press the following to get into BIOS.

Ctrl, Alt, Esc together at the same time.

You can try restoring the registry with restore wizard on the Hirens Boot CD.

You can also use do an offline system restore using the Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset.

 

haii !

i will try the shortcut, and see i that works. if i can't get in there i'm not sure how much use a boot cd is going to be.

what's this second link you've given me? it seems to be mostly about some other tool, which isn't freeware. why wouldn't a microsoft tool be under the microsoft.com domain ?

 

It is not freeware, the link to the Chips site is for Microsoft DART. It is a 30 day demo. This version is for XP which Microsoft pulled and wrapped it in another package for enterprise customers which is now called MDOP for Windows Vista, 7. Chips still has it available for download.

 

the keyboard shortcut to acess the bios menu isn't working.
I can't do anything with boot CDs if i can't access the bios to change boot settings. Kind of at a wall here.


any advice?

 

Remove the battery
remove the hard drive
replace the battery
it should now boot to bios
change to boot from cd first.
Shut down, remove battery
replace hard drive
replace battery
if you have the xp disc, or, hirums boot cd, it should now work.

 

this didn't work. nothing unusual happened.

however i did accidentally stumble across a workaround in the process. it boots from CD next automatically, when no hard drive is connected.

for now my plan is to try the boot cds mentioned here, through the above workaround. by reconnecting the hard drive after booting from cd has started, and hoping that will work

 

This is making no sense, and you're telling me different things to what the link does. Who comes up with something this convoluted? Please help me to understand this.

DART is a microsoft toolkit, right? It contains <things>. Among which is ERD Commander 2007, am i right?

What is the 30-day trial of. The whole toolkit? or just that component of it (ERD commander 2007)


The link says this (amongst other crazy things)

now this makes no sense, because I read it as:

do you see my problem here? is this just a badly written instruction or what? why would a component's executable file have the name of the toolkit that it's contained in?



this next bit is even worse:

again, this reads as:

wtf? The toolkit is installed by running the iso of one of it's component parts, which (as per the previus instruction) is created by installing the toolkit? this is circular logic.

Who wrote this? maybe english wasn't their first language. I'm not splitting hairs here, i seriously have no idea what i'm supposed to do with this thing. The instructions make no sense and contradict itself in several places. Where am i supposed to install this stuff anyway? on another pc and then burn some iso's out of it? an msi sure isn't helpful for a non bootable machine.

 

well i'm having no luck. it seems that the machine won't recognise the hard drive it it's not plugged in at boot. and it won't load from the cd if the hard drive is plugged in at boot either, so i can't use boot cd's to do anything with the drive

figuring out how to fix this broken bios menu seems necessary now

 

Plugging drives into the ide/sata port after a pc has booted isn't a good idea, its not really designed to be hot swap.