Windows hang during startup

[heliaskes]

Hello everyone,

I have an Acer Laptop and i seem to face the following problem.. During startup my laptop hangs in the screen just before "Welcome" of WinXP (i mean the screen with the small flag). The HDD stops working and it can stay there forever if i dont switch it off from the power button. I tried to start it on safe mode, but still it seems to hang.. any advices would be welcome!!

thnx a lot in advance!

heliaskes

[BOB IROC]

Sounds like you could have a failed hard drive.

[heliaskes]

thnx for the quick reply!!

But the thing is that the BIOS can find the hdd... I am saying it because I ve already checked some other posts from guys that had similar problems, and if BIOS could trace the HDD then there shouldnt be a problem with it... So I was assuming that its not the hdd which creates the problem but something else... I have to admit that I did something with the registry yesterday.. Does this ring a bell?

but anyway, how safe/easy is it to get the hdd out of a laptop?

[Guts3d]

Do you have any U.S.B. drives plugged into it during boor? I have seen them interfere at that point on other machines, worth a look.

[NooNoo]

Playing with the registry is always a risk. Can you remember what keys you played with?

Annoyingly, Acer provide restore disks which wipe the system rather than repair it. How long did you leave it trying to get to safe mode? Did you try safe mode with or without networking?

I would go for a repair install if you can find a windows xp cd... if not, did you have a lot of data you need to back up?

[heliaskes]

hey guys!

thanx for your help!!!

eventually, i installed windows in my second partition and everything went smooth.. i kept everything i wanted and i formatted the drive! i didnt have any problems with my hdd luckily... i d like to thank you a lot for your help!

[NooNoo]

Anytime!

[rayrayguy]

I am having the same problem as this. But, my windows would start up sometimes, as you can see, and sometimes not. I tried to re-install windows from my cd but it would hang there before I could start the re-install. Should I try to install first or wipe my c: drive and re-install from there? I partitioned my drive so most of my stuff is on my d: drive right now... HELP!!

Thanks

[heliaskes]

Hey rayrayguy!

As I wrote I installed win xp in the second partition to avoid losing stuff from c:. But if you dont have anything important on c:, I suggest you format it. It is always good and makes ur pc go much faster..

[NooNoo]

I am having the same problem as this. But, my windows would start up sometimes, as you can see, and sometimes not. I tried to re-install windows from my cd but it would hang there before I could start the re-install. Should I try to install first or wipe my c: drive and re-install from there? I partitioned my drive so most of my stuff is on my d: drive right now... HELP!!

Thanks

Have you tried a repair install? full instructions here If most of your data is on D drive, and XP on C, then there will be no problem with keeping your data.

[rayrayguy]

I tried the repair, but it would freeze up before I could complete it.

[Mayet]

I would try a full format and reload if a repair install doesn't work. At least you know your load is clean and if you are still having issues you can narrow it down to the hardware concerned, IE: Hard Drive failure, RAM failure, Motherboard failure.