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Sometimes my computer starts fine, sometimes it ends in this:

Black Screen of Death

I've never seen the whole process of it getting to this screen, so I'm not sure if it goes directly to this or if it gives you a chance to change BIOS settings first. But I am pretty sure it never even starts to load Windows.

Usually if I reboot with the dedicated restart button it will restart into Windows just fine. But today that's not working. Even doing a hard shutdown and starting it up again results in the same screen.

My power supply is one I reused from an old PC. Could it be bogging down and causing the voltages to be low? I don't even know what the voltages should be.

OS: Windows 7 Ultimate
CPU: AMD 965BE 3.4Ghz quad core
Motherboard: Biostar TA-890GXB
RAM: 4GB

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  • Can you do a DPS self-test on that hard drive to see if the drive is mechanically failing? If it is, usually the BIOS will complain saying you should back it up - but if the hard drive is losing power, it might be a bad hdd, psu, or mobo. Do you have the ability to switch out the parts for debugging? Also, have you checked the boot order in your bios?
    – Zero
    Aug 23, 2012 at 15:06
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    Try unplugging or removing integral hardware and see if you can get it to go beyond this. Example being.. Unplug HDD and if you get past this, and get a 'no harddrive detected'-like error , then it will help your troubleshooting steps.
    – DaBaer
    Aug 23, 2012 at 15:51

1 Answer 1

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It wouldn't boot because of an SD card I had inserted via USB card reader. It only causes that problem with one particular SD card. It threw me back to the days when you would get a "non-System disk" error when trying to boot up with a floppy disk still in the drive.

Thanks for the help!

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