My Project arcade wont turn on ... NOOOOO!

[Pioneer]

You guys have helped me through every problem so far
But now the last thing is the sound... there is none

All the sound options were greyed out in the control panel

It was like 3 in the morning and a was so tired I wasn't thinking, I just reached over and shut off the power without shutting down windows

BIG MISTAKE

now I can only get it to boot with the xp disk and when I press the option for safe mode it displays a screen full of numbers and then freezes

WHAT SHOULD I DO ?

[RayB]

1. Cry

2. Check that your sound card hasn't come out of its slot.

3. Check nothing else has come out of its slot.

4. Check that your CPU fan is still working.

5. Keep rebooting and see if anything different happens.

[hypernova]

6.  If none of the above options work, find a useless item and something to beat it with.  Then have at it. 

7.  If that doesn't help calm yourself, find something else to beat.  Repeat ad nauseam.

Good luck.  Hope you figure out the problem.

[Pioneer]

Thanks for the encouragement

I'm running off of the onboard sound, not a sound card.
Do you think if I put one in it might fix the problem?

Also is there a way to reset the motherboard?  Would that help?

Or re-format the harddrive with another computer and then slap it back in and start over ?      Am I on the right track?

[Havok]

You should run chkdsk on the drive. There may be bad sectors...

[RayB]

Well, what I want to know is if you USED to have sound or not. If you never had it, and this is your last piece of the puzzle, then all you probably need is drivers.

If it used to work and now it stopped, and you get boot up problems, then something probably got corrupted on the hard drive.

I'd start by booting 2 or 3 times to see if the problem "goes away".

If it doesn't, a scan of the HD would be good, or even try a reformat and fresh OS install I guess. All depends on how much stuff you have on your HD that you don't want to lose. If there's nothing you care about, then go for a format.

[Pioneer]

I've never had sound so I bet it is driver problems... Thant's easy.
ok

I hope it's not the hard drive
Even though there's nothing on it except XP and MAME
It takes forever to reformat, intall 98, then xp update.  Arrrg.

I've already booted about a dozen times, but I'll try again today

Thanks Bro.

[JoyMonkey]

It's probably just a bad sector. I'd try booting from a live cd with ntfs support like one made with Barts PE Builder and run checkdisk.

The same thing keeps happening to my aunts laptop and this is how I fix it each time (she just won't learn how to turn it off safely).

Edit: Actually, since this is a desktop it should be easier, take the hard-drive out and connect it to another PC as a secondary volume, then boot it up and run checkdisk.

[Pioneer]

Thanks alot JoyMonkey