# Help my friend screwed up his PC



## MQuattro (Jan 27, 2011)

So I was at my friends house, basically just explaining what overclocking is to him. One youtube video later he's in the BIOS overclocking his speed from 333 to 400. We were also in Disk Manager before this. In Disk Manager we made a partition drive, and also made his C: active. The reason we made his C: active is because that is where his operating system was installed, and he had been having boot up problems for a long time. It wasn't active at the time, but other drives that windows was not installed on were. He would have to go into BIOS, and change his startup drive order, so that windows would boot. What Im getting at is that after a restart his computer gave us an error. It said that the previous overclock attempt had failed, and that it will now restore factory defaults, and try to start again. Needless to say the computer will not turn back on. The only real thing we can do is during startup we can hit F12 I believe, and tell it which drive to boot from. Whichever we choose it gives us a BOOTMGR is missing error. We tried inserting the windows7 CD that it came with, but when it gets to part that says choose which drive to install windows on it gives us an error, saying it cant find an existing partition on this drive please see setup files for more information. My question is...

a. did we destroy his computer?
b. do you think overclocking is the main reason we are having problems, or is it the fact that he made his C drive active?

BTW I did warn him many times, and told him bad idea. The computer is an Alienware ALX aurora. Its about a year old, I think it cost around 3500-4000 without the super cool monitor he got. I think it's a quad core intel with 333 MHZ. I believe he has 18GB of RAM speed 1033, not sure if DDR2, or 3. Please I feel really bad, although I told him not to do it, It still sucks. He has a warranty, if all else fails we can try that route, but I'd like to see if it's fixable. Thanks in advance for you help.


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## visseroth (Oct 25, 2010)

Sounds to me like you had a problem prior to trying to overclock which was a no no without checking to see what your normal and max temps are under load and ensuring that your system is already stable.

I would recommend resetting the cmos and trying to boot the system again. It sounds like something is bad, whether it be a stick of ram or the hard drive it is hard to say for certain right now.

Double check the warranty information to be sure to not void the warranty then if taking the hard drive out does not void the warranty I would plug it into another machine and check the smart status using HDDScan (linked my my sig) and run a check disk on the drive and see if there are any errors since it seems the installation disk doesn't recognize that there is a installed operating system.

You could also try a "bootrec /fixboot" in the command prompt of the installation disc and see if that resolves the issue.

Take a look at this... Fixing "BOOTMGR is missing" Error While Trying to Boot Windows 7 or Vista - How-To Geek


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## MQuattro (Jan 27, 2011)

Hi Visseroth,

Thanks for the reply. I have a few questions. How do I reset the cmos? So you don't think we burnt his CPU, we only ran it for like 30 seconds, when it didn't start up we powered it down. I will try the hard drive in another computer, but I don't have one available right now. Also bootrec/fixboot, I don't have a command prompt to enter that in. When I put in the windows CD, it asks me for language, then country. When I hit next, it shows me a list of all hard drives available, and asks which to install windows on? _It doesn't let me install on any. I looked at a fix BOOTMNG website yesterday, but the repair startup option is not there? Thanks again._


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## Tyree (May 10, 2009)

Dito on clearing the CMOS. The C: drive is the assigned boot drive so no Bios changes should have been necessary.
Personally, I would zero the Hdd and start over. Any additional partitions can be done at that time.
To clear the CMOS you can UNPLUG the power cord to the PSU and remove the CMOS battery for a few minutes or UNPLUG the power cord and move the CMOS jumper from pins 1 & 2 to pins 2 & 3 for ten seconds then move the jumper back to pins 1 &2.


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