Computer hangs on startup

[cubby1223]

Have a computer here, troublesome past, but always worked. Now it doesn't. When Windows XP loads up, it gets to the (I don't know what to call it) "Windows is starting up" screen, with the blue background, Windows logo, and text that says starting up then logging on (if memory serves me correctly). Thing is I only get the Windows logo on this screen and no text below it. The computer then hangs, but is not locked up as I can still move the mouse cursor. This happens in both normal and safe mode.

Ran Memtest+, no errors. Ran chkdsk, no errors. Drive hooked to another computer ran virus scans, nothing found.

I do not believe in system restore, and I don't remember if it was enabled or not on this computer. I'll use it only as a last resort.

I am currently making a backup of the hard drive then will do a repair install of Windows, see if that gets me anywhere.


Hoping there's an idea somewhere out there? The keywords describing the problem are too generic to find anything useful on google.

 

[mpilchfamily]

First of all are you OCing at all? I've seen this happen when the OC is unstable. This can also happen if there is a any corruption on the HDD. So if no OC is involved here then pop in your disk for XP and run a repair install. You won't loose any of your data but backing things up is a good idea anyway.

Repair install.
Pop in the XP disk and restart the computer. Make sure the Optical drive is the first drive the system tries to boot from. You can change this in the bios. Hit enter when the system asks if you want to boot from optical device. When the CD loads up choose to install XP. Don't hit the repair install yet. The disk will then check the HDD. When it sees you have an installation of XP on it already it will ask if you want to continue the install or perform a repair. Now you select repair and let it do its thing. Everything else is self explanatory.

 

[daveybrat]

Cubby, download UBCD4Win and create the bootable disk with it. Run EZPCFix which will be on the desktop of the program. With it you can delete all temp files and also look at what's starting up in your registry.

You can also run superantispyware from the disk and let it do updates as well. There are a ton of tools you can run from the disk on your hard drive and it runs from a windows environment.

It's a great cd that is perfect for systems that will not boot into windows like yours.

 

[cubby1223]

The good ol' repair install got the job done. Still don't know what was wrong, or how to even figure it out. Just chalk it up to a troublesome computer - been that way ever since the primary partition was overloaded with programs and data files, and Windows compressed every file on the drive to save the tiniest amount of disk space...