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I woke up Saturday morning to find my PC unable to boot up. It is an h8-1214 64bit with Win7 Home Premium. It will get to the point where it says "Starting Windows", then the little colorful Windows flourish, then nothing...Tried a reinstall, but I get the message:

"A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disc, CD, DVD, or USB flash drive, please insert it now.

"Note: If the Windows installation media is in the CD/DVD drive, you can safely remove it for this step."

I have tried to download drivers into a flash drive from my brother's pc, which I am using now, but have been unsuccessful so far. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

No CD/DVD driver is ever required to install Windows - that's a native Windows driver. I would suspect that there is a hardware problem and once you fix it, Windows may boot just fine without a reinstall.

Check the mobo for swollen or leaking capacitors. Do a Google search if you need pictures. Leaking caps are a dead sentence for the mobo.

Remove and reseat the memory sticks. Also try one stick by itself, and then the other by itself. Try running MEMTEST86+ overnight with both installed.

Next borrow or buy a copy of Spinrite and run a level 2 scan on your hard drive.

See if it boots or, if not, see if you can do a re-install.

If thus an OEM PC (Dell, HP, etc) Google for the factory restore key combination. All PCs the past 10 years come with a hidden partition that contains a full image of the factory OS install. The factory restore menu will allow you to restore the factory image (but you will lose any data on the drive unless the menu gives you an option to save it in a folder).

Hope this helps.

I didn't think I needed any drivers, and this confused the hell out of me. I can get the system to start up to the point where I can choose "safe mode, safe mode with networking," etc, and even up to the point where it displays "Starting Windows" with the little Windows flourish; then it goes dark, the curser remains, but it never gets any farther.

My question then is, that if it were a bad mobo, would it even get that far? Or bad RAM?

id run spinrite on it, sounds like a hard drive problem when it cant read some of it. or if you made a repair cd maybe that would fix it

Lotta things it could be, and yes it could get that far if the mobo was bad or the memory was bad.

Memory would be the PRIME suspect at this point. Running MEMTEST86+ all night should tell you for sure. Next would be hard drive and yeah, Spinrite level 2 may fix it.

Are you trying to repair the old install? It could be something happened and corrupted the old install so badly that there's no way to repair it. If you have another drive to test with, you could try doing a fresh install on it and see what happens.

Actually, I did replace the harddrive with a brand new unit, and tried a fresh install; same results. I also cannot see any obvious leaky or swollen capacitors. I will try MEMTEST86+ next. Thanks!

Try changing the boot order as stated on this site, and disable the floppy boot from the bios.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/30801 ... ssing-idea