Windows XP crashes starting yesterday...

[4_Legs_Good]

Hi everyone!

Is anyone out there experiencing a massive meltdown of their PC? I'm running XP with out of date virus protection software, and this morning (I didn't boot that machine yesterday) the system ground to a halt with an Error on booting saying that Windows had not properly booted last time. It gives me the standard "which of these options do you want to use to boot" deal, of which none work. They all get to a point and then the system restarts again.

A co-worker seems to have the same problem which started yesterday morning - both of these are on our home machines and neither of us has any real common files/applications, other than that we're both running XP. His virus protection is up to date.

Any ideas? Anyone else experiencing this?

david

[CabalPowered]

1. Have you tried

F8 during boot and selected "use last known good configuration"?

[4_Legs_Good]

2. It gives that as one of the options

when it gets to the how do you want to boot page, and it doesn't work either.

I haven't tried to stop it before it gets there with F8 yet, though.

Hmmmm...

david

[CabalPowered]

3. Next option is to hit f8 during boot and select safe mode

If you can get loaded into safe mode, you'll have some options to troubleshoot it.

[4_Legs_Good]

4. Okey dok! I'll try that when I get home

if that doesn't work, I guess I'll start pulling everything out and putting it back together one piece at a time.

Thanks!

david

[CabalPowered]

5. If you can't get safe mode to work

Put your Windows disk in and restart. Windows should ask you if you want to repair your installation. Beware though, I've had some repairs go bad when there's a hardware failure. If you have data that you MUST keep safe, your safest route is to pull the hard drive and install it as a second hard drive in another computer. Then move the data off that disk and onto a good disk, reinstall the drive into the bad comp and reload windows. Good luck!

[Crazy Dave]

6. The NSA did it.

[4_Legs_Good]

7. yeah, i'm pretty sure that was it

they've been on my ass for a while now.

thank goodness for the :tinfoilhat: or I'd be in deep shit.

:)

david

[Solon]

8. Another option, especially for data backup, because it sounds like you...

may need to do a reinstallation, and the repair installation option can ruin the disk. Anyways, one is to use BartPE, you can get it here. Its only useful if you have access to your original install disk and a computer with a CD burner. OK, instructions are actually simple, you put in you Windows XP install disk, run the BartPE program, then you will have an ISO(CD IMAGE) saved on hard disk, burn it using Nero or another utility as a CD Image. Then, with that newly burned disk, you can then boot that disk on your computer and have a working "LiveCD" of Windows XP, with this you can transfer files from you disk and their are many different programs from Windows you can use to repair or backup your data and system.

Another option is to get a Linux live CD with anti-virus and other utilities that can be used for the same purpose. I would recommend Knoppix for this purpose.

[4_Legs_Good]

9. Okay, thanks!

I have another machine at home that I can try swapping drives on, and re-installing everything isn't the end of the world for me, especially if I can recover the files I've been working on.

I'll give your advice a shot.

thanks again!

david

[Nye Bevan]

10. Try System Restore first

assuming you have it enabled (which is the default). Go back to a restore point a couple of days before you had problems. Worth a try and you can always "undo" the restore if necessary.

[Solon]

11. I echo what you say...

Mine's a method of last resort, though the good thing is that my method doesn't really involve even touching the hard drives till absolutely necessary. But, I learned the hard way about Windows, and always have a LiveCD for some operating system available just in case.