Can't get past Boot Choices screen

[GreenLantern]

I am trying to help a friend over the phone.

They have an old celeron or P4 running WinXP. The pc was running fine. They power down every night.

Problem:
One day they started the computer, it posted, then tries to load windows and arrives at the boot choices screen (as if F8 was pressed)

No matter what choice (last good config, normal, safe), it writes layman's gibberish then reboots and arrives back at the boot choice screen.

So:
We powered down for 30 sec - no change. Disk seems to be spinning.

Tried a windows repair. But after the user licence agreement it does not see a windows installation.

It just has partition1, 150,000MB total, 150,000MB free. With only options of partitioning and formatting.

Seems that not only is boot sector corrupted, it also can't see contents.

Saving data is not a big issue, they are backed up.

My only thoughts are Spinrite or fresh install.

Any thoughts?

 

[robisbell]

they were infected and it's wiped the drive enough that a full partition deletion and OS reinstall is needed.

stay away from spinrite, the Xp cd will be fine for what needs to be done.

 

[siskel77]

chkdsk /r at the recovery console might help restore the system. From your description it sounds like the file system is corrupted. Recovery console can be accessed by booting from the xp installation cd and press "R" at the first repair option. You should boot to a command prompt at that point. Type at the command prompt "chkdsk /r" and wait for an hour or so. Might be just as easy to reload the system from scratch if that has not been done in awhile and no data recovery is necessary.

 

[GreenLantern]

Thanks robisbell, but what are you saying needs to be done?

 

[GreenLantern]

thanks siskel, I'll see what he says about just starting over.

Fresh install will prob best sol'n anyway

 

[robisbell]

that's what I was saying, wipe the dive completely clean and reload.