How to troubleshoot a system that will not boot to the hard drive.

1. Ensure that there is no diskette in the A: drive if system is equipped with a 1.44 Floppy Diskette Drive. If a disk in the drive, remove it and reboot.
   
2. Boot to the BIOS, reset defaults, reboot
3. If system still will not boot to the hard drive, power off, disconnect all peripheral items (Printer, scanner, external drives and USB drives) reboot.
4. At this point, boot to Diagnostics partition, or CD (F12 menu on some systems, Some HP systems have Hard drive diags in BIOS, Fn+Power for Dell Portables, CTRL+ALT+D for some Dell Desktops) If the hard drive fails diagnostics, replace the hard drive. If the drive passes diagnostics, it is not a guarantee the drive is good, just no fault was detected.
5. If the drive passes diags, then see if you can boot to a Windows CD/DVD. If you can't, either remove, turn off in BIOS or disconnect the hard drive, and see if you can boot to the Windows Media. If you can with the HDD disabled/removed/disconnected, again, replace the HDD.
6. If you can boot to the Windows Media, then go to Recovery Console in XP and run CHKDSK /R (Vista or Windows 7, run the repair my computer option off the menu, this may take multiple passes to fix) If this fails to resolve, then boot back to recovery console and run BOOTCFG /REBUILD (This is already done in Vista/7 in the repair tool)
   
7. If that fails, you will most likely be reinstalling Windows. If the Windows install crashes during a file copy, try RAM modules one at a time (Windows install is still the best RAM test we have) If the Windows install still crashes, replace the Hard Drive.