xp won't finish booting

[mattyx]

hi, a buddy of mine called me today saying last night he came into his office and his computer had the blue screen of death.

now when he tries to boot, it will get to the point where the bar is loading on the bottom but it gets about 3/4 of the way and won't finish. so he can't get into xp at all. not in safe mode either.

any ideas on how i should go about trying to fix this? i am not that familiar with windows xp. can i put the cd in and do a recovery or something like that? or how do i use the restore last good configuration option (there is one, right?)

thanks for any help.

[NooNoo]

If you are not familiar with windows xp this is a very bad idea to learn on your friends box.

It would depend on what that blue screen of death actually said, whether he has a branded machine with a restore cd or a standard xp cd - or in some cases no xp cd at all.

Yes there is a last known good, and if it didnt finish booting, it should have automatically offered safe mode and a number of other options.

[mattyx]

i am not totally unfamiliar with xp. i just don't use it personally. i built his box so i've used xp but only on his deal.

he's blown it up before and i just end up reloading it. although this time is was stable for quite a while before this incident.

not sure what he did, but he likes to mess around every know and then....

anyhow, he said it tries to boot into safe mode and freezes there as well, so sounds like it is doing what its supposed to do but not finishing.

should i have him attempt to have it boot off the xp disc?

[mattyx]

oh, to answer your questions....its a legal oem version of the cd, but we built the box.

[NooNoo]

Originally posted by mattyx
i am not totally unfamiliar with xp. i just don't use it personally. i built his box so i've used xp but only on his deal.

he's blown it up before and i just end up reloading it. although this time is was stable for quite a while before this incident.

not sure what he did, but he likes to mess around every know and then....

anyhow, he said it tries to boot into safe mode and freezes there as well, so sounds like it is doing what its supposed to do but not finishing.

should i have him attempt to have it boot off the xp disc?

The bsod may indicate a hardware problem, knowing what that was is key to preventing it happening again.

You can do that and run an automatic repair - that is let the setup run all the way in and ignore the first repair option- when it gets to the point when it asks you whether to format or not it also offers an automatic repair, take that option.

[mattyx]

thanks. i'll give it a shot and post results.

[mattyx]

okay, problem is the fan went out on the video card. fixed that but something else happened. it won't boot, and when i try to get to the windows set up booting from the xp cd-rom, i get an error message that says:

file \i386\ntkrnlmp.exe could not be loaded. the error code is 4. setup cannot continue. press any key to exit.

not sure what to do at this point. would prefer not to reload this computer, but may have to.

any suggestions would be appreciated. thanks.

[NooNoo]

This indicates a problem with the processor... investigate whether the processor is good before proceeding - just because it will boot is not an indication that the processor is in perfect working order.

Considering that this machine crashed unexpectedly, I would suggest a thorough hardware test first.

[mattyx]

okay, after some further analysis, it seems the problem is the hard drive, and that is not good. i have taken the drive out and hooked it up to another machine to attempt to recover the data and the bios can see the drive, but the os cannot.

meaning, once the computer boots into the OS, the drive is not visible as a lettered drive. but it shows up in the hardware manager.

its a western digital hard drive, so hopefully i can get some data off it. it is in ntfs file format, so i am not sure what my options are......

any suggestions......

[mattyx]

aha! issue resolved. noo noo, you were close. it was a bad memory stick. what a pain the butt to try to find that. i actually found info on this on another board, so i will post it here for reference in the future:

http://www.computing.net/windows2000...rum/31272.html