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Computer restarts before going into Windows

M

Martyuk39

Member
A computer's been quite happily running for 3 months. All of a sudden it just reboots after post and before reaching the Windows XP login screen. And next time it comes up with the menu - safe mode, last known good etc - I've tried all those to no avail.

It could be software-related - in spite of the XP firewall, Ad-aware, Grisoft, the user's children have been downloading all sorts of rubbish. Could it be hardware? It's an Antler case with a 350w power supply (cheap but I've built at least half a dozen with no problems), Asus A7N8X-VM400 board, 512MB Crucial RAM, 80GB Maxtor IDE, DVD/CDRW and floppy. Nothing fancy, so I don't think the power supply is overloaded.

I'd appreciate some guidance - I can't even get into Windows and I'd like somehow to salvage users' files. It's a family PC and as such they haven't been doing much in the way of backup. Easy to nuke if it's a software issue but I'd rather not.
Thanks
Martin
 
The quickest way out of this would be to hook this drive up to another PC as a slave and run an AV scan then copy off what you need.
Put it back into the original PC as the master, format & reload.
Then copy back everything you had copied off.

Just my $0.02
 
maybe you can make a boot disk with the ntldr, ntdect & boot.ini files if you have access to a similar XP machine. You could do a repair installation to save you hrs of troubleshooting. Or maybe boot in to the recovery console and run a system file check to see if any system files have become corrupt.
 
You didn't mention "System Restore". Yes, I know that might not seem like an option since you can't boot into windows. But, there is a way to get to System Restore from the command prompt.

Have you tried "Safe Mode with Command Prompt"? This won't load the Windows GUI, which might be part of your problem.
 
Right, when I boot into Safe Mode with command prompt it gets to mup.sys and then reboots. I can put in the Windows CD and get to the recovery console. Having done a search for mup.sys I tried disabling mup - by typing disable mup as you do. This is the result:

"The system registry does not appear to have an active ControlSet key
The system registry may be damaged

If your system is currently not starting correctly, you can try restarting it with the Last Known Good configuration or you can try repairing the installation of Windows using the setup program's repair and recovery options.
The registry entry for the mup service cannot be located.
Check that the name of the service is specified correctly."

The mup.sys error seems to be a bit of a toughie to crack. People talk about disabling this and that. It's a very basic Asus A7N8X-VM400, onboard VGA, no USB devices etc. I don't know what to do next. For instance, once in the recovery console, what can I do from there? Or should I try something in hardware?
Thanks
 
Update - I did a dir on C: in the recovery console and got the following:

an error occurred during directory enumeration

So then I ran chkdsk/r and it repaired a couple of things and now the system boots straight into XP.

I've passworded mum and dad and made the kids limited accounts. Run AVG and got rid of a couple of Trojans, ran Ad-aware which found 82 new critical objects. It's less than a month since I last did it so that's good going!

Question is - should I be concerned that there could be a problem with the hard disk? If so, apart from scandisk/chkdsk is there anything else I could be doing?
 
I don't know that it's a hard disk issue, as anything (crash or power outage) can cause file corruption.

What you might want to do, to, is run the System File Checker on that pc to ensure that all the system files are correct.

Start Button>Run>type in (without quotes) "sfc /scannow">click OK

Have the XP CD in the cd drive before doing this, and exit out of the XP install screen when it pops up.

The System File Checker will just come up in a little box, do it's thing for a few minutes, and disappear. Reboot afterwards. The System File Checker takes into account any hotfixes and service packs, so it won't be replacing these updates with cd files, if that was a concern.
 
Paranoid isn't the word I'd use for doing something that excessive. At the worst a repair install should serve as a quick dumb fix for most "Windows system files are fscked and it can't boot" problems. Which is what it sounds like.

If you know how you can fix it from recovery console without sitting through an entire Windows installation.
 
And yes I registered just to point out that what you're telling the guy to do is way off base. Reformat should be saved for SEVERE corruption issues only, which are usually a symptom of impending drive failure anyway.
 
Thanks Ashmedai. I'm adopting the middle ground - I've run chkdsk, scandisk, sfc, and more importantly I've backed everything up. That'll do for now. My theory is that it was switched off in a hurry with a million things open. And chkdsk fixed it.

No doubt I'll be back here in a couple of weeks with total hardware failure!
 
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