Computer (Windows XP) Problem

[Cptn Patches537]

Thanks for all your help guys, im gonna make one last phone call tommorrow and just take it in...this is where the wonder of our country comes into play because i can pay somebody to do something i dont wanna! lol

Originally Posted by EHaskins

The first thing you should do is move the drive into an external enclosure, not internal so there is no chance of booting from it, and backup everything you care about.

A quick search doesn't show that this issue is known to be related to SP3, so we'll assume its unrelated to what you were doing.

It is very likely this is physical HDD damage. If the machine is >3 or 4 years old this is not uncommon.

The easiest way to rule out this option is to run a HDD diagnotic tool. I use SeaTools which is free from Seagate, but works on almost any drive. There is a Windows version if you move the drive to another machine, and there is a bootable DOS version which can be run from a CD or floppy. You should run this to determine if the drive if physically healthy.

From SeaTools you should run the following tests (Depending on the size of the drive this could take over a hour.)
Run the short test, if that fails buy a new drive. If the itsucceeds then run the long test.
If the long test fails buy a new drive.
If the long test succeeds after repair run the test again, if it finds more errors buy a new drive.
If the long test succeeds you can be fairly sure its a software issue.


If this is a software issue you may be able to recover your machine, but you probably won't be able to get the machine very stable. My recommendation is run fixmbr from recovery console, delete ALL partitions on the drive, recreate and format any partitions, then reinstall Windows. However if you don't want to do that there are two things you can try.

Either of these options may cause data loss/corruption, so make sure you've backup up your data!

1. It could just be a MBR corruption issue, this could be due to a virus, HDD damage, or something else. Assuming the HDD is still functional this can be corrected from Recovery Console if you can get it to load, by using the fixmbr command.

2. You can try doing an over-the-top installation of XP. This would replace the system file with original ones. This could save files, but application installs and system configuration would be lost.

when my 4 year old laptop did something similar it did in fact turn out to be physical drive failure, I just couldn't get into anything for more than a couple of seconds and crash! it was the drive, I installed new drive and all was good so yup they sure do fail that way. Kinda surprised me because it gave no warning, no troubles at all until maybe one or two troubled starts and then that was it....blue screen and no start and done!.

m

[daltore]

Personally, I would third the Linux LiveCD. If you don't know how to use Linux, I suggest learning at least enough to get around the graphical environment of Knoppix to be able to access your hard drive in case this kind of thing happens again. It is a very useful tool that can save you a HUGE amount of pain. Also good for accessing files on really old machines to which you don't remember the password! And if you have a hard drive that is physically damaged and the computer repair place can't get any data off of it, often times, Knoppix can! I had a dead 40 GB a few years ago, and the place couldn't copy the drive with their machine because it registered the drive as broken, so I took it home with a new drive and did it all on my computer without a single lost bit! Maybe something to do with the fact that I was only accessing a KB at a time (took about 12 hours for 15 gigs of data), but still.

[Trent B]

Few comments on the issue

Be wary of AVG as it seems to have a lot of false positives (I haven't experienced them but I have read about them) for example read the following as it is very recent
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/avg...oval,6587.html

Second, having linux live cds can be a life saver, even when I don't need them I use them to back up my harddrive, windows constantly creates errors when I back up my drives before reformatting because a file is currently being read, especially in the my documents folder, however in linux, you can just drag and drop the whole folder and sort out the mess of which files you need and don't need after you reformat.

Best of luck as windows installs gone wrong can be a complete and utter pain to fix.

TB

[dpeterson3]

I agree with them. Get the latest copy of Knoppix and a flash drive. You can transfer all your files off that way. Knoppix was designed to be Windows-user friendly. (In fact, it got me to make the permant switch). There is also some software out there called mlewarebytes that is supposed to get rid of just about any virus and is bootable (I've never tried it, only heard about it from my teacher). If neither one of those work, look into superGrub. It is the linux bootloader on a CD. I used it this morning to get my machine back in bootable state. It seems to work well. If nothing else, it might get you to the point you can force it to boot in safe mode. There are also a few tools (DSL) which you can install on a flash dive and boot if your BIOS supports it.

[FourPenguins]

Originally Posted by martin417

If you can boot from the Windows CD, you can do a "repair install". after you boot, DO NOT GO TO THE REPAIR CONSOLE, go ahead And tell it to install windows. It will then do a disk check and tell you that windows already exists on this partition and ask if you want to repair. Say yes. It looks like it is reinstalling windows, but it's not. It will replace all system files. I think it will return you to the service pack level of the install CD, not sure on that. If you google "repair install XP" you should find lots of info.

Good luck.

I second this method. It is the most reliable way to fix an unknown Windows OS problem, especially stemming from a corrupted file. The linux junkies can do what they want, but this is a nice tool from Microsoft that I've found easy to use and invaluable.
Once you're back up and running, I suggest you do all the regular maintenance (scandisk, defrag, antivirus, antimalware, registry check, and uninstall programs you don't use.)