Really BIG problem.

[tvradict]

Went to bed last night, leaving the PC running as usual. Pistonheads open, Wharfedale Site open and Shareaza running. No changes to system setup all day. The only thing I was playing with Hardware wise was the router I refered to on another thread.

I woke up this morning, far too early, went to pc, touched mouse then noticed the screen was black, but it was lit. ie, not on standby as it should have been. moved the mouse and hit a few keys, nothing happened. Restarted it, wouldn't boot into windows, blah safe mode didn't work, still wouldn't boot.

Inserted XP disc, tried to repair installation, it deleted what seemed like a hundred files. then it went into the setup stage. Went to Windows Setup screen with the progress on the left hand side and a run through of how brilliant windows is on the main frame of the screen. It tries to install a file, I can't find a relevant cd, its not a Dell specific, I can't find it on the windows disc, so I'm lost.

Is there anywhere I can try and get this file (I am looking at the Dell site atm)?

But more importantly, how can a perfectly healthy PC, go from working perfectly, to overnight with no user input??

TIA
Stuart.

[GreenV8S]

Do you have any hardware diagnostics? If its a well known brand PC you should be able to get them from the manufacturer. This might show whether you have a hardware problem.

[tvradict]

None myself, Its a Dell but PC don't breakdown over a weekend so its gonna be Monday before I can speak to anyone.

I'll find out what they can do, I've got a 1yr Collect and Return policy with it, but I can't wait for all that.

[jimmyc412t2]

Dell do excellent diagnostics software. Give that a go for hardware problems. It'll on their website ...somewhere.

If you can't get windows back on successfully that is the first step.

[GreenV8S]

My Dell came with a bootable diagostic CD that was very helpful to diagnose a recent HD failure. I expect you will be able to download it from their website if you don't have a similar CD. Dell's support really is excellent IMO, starting from the service tag displayed on the outside of the case you can find pretty much everything applicable to that system.