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Corrupt OS - Rebooting

F

FishToRat

Junior Member
I'm trying to help a friend fix her laptop. Every time she turns it on it gets stuck in a cycle of rebooting. For example, the XP loading screen appears and then the computer restarts and goes to the "select an operating system" menu with a "safe mode" choice. It doesn't matter which option you pick as the computer will restart as soon as it begins loading XP.

Complicating things further is the fact that my friend uses Outlook Express and MS Office. I'm pretty sure that reinstalling XP would overwrite these user folders and files.

Any thoughts as to how I could either get the computer to boot up normally or back up important documents and emails in order to do a format?

Thanks!

 
it sounds liek the unit is bluescreening and immiiately rebooting so you can barely even see the blue screen, i see this almost daily, the first thing i do is boot the computer to the Windows XP Install CD, and go into the recovery console and run chkdsk /r, once it completes, try rebooting and see if it loads windows, ive had this fix countless laptops and desktops to date. It will take a while, maybe a good half hour, but be patient, it will finish and possibly fix the computer, if that DOESNT work, use the xp cd again and instead of the recovery console, jsut opt for a repair installation, this wont remove any data, it will only reinstall base system files that could be the problem. if that still doesnt work, try and see what the blue screen says, or determine if it IS a blue screen, if it IS really, get the error, and search it on google, or post it here and we'll go from there
 
no problem! 🙂
this problem, SOMETIMES can be an indication of a failing hard drive, one thing i do if it does fix the problem is do a HDD test, like a non destructive read or write to make sure theres no bad sectors, id hate to have it crap out on her later, and permanently
 
I tried this and it said "The drive may have one or more unrecoverable errors..." then when I try to run a repair installation, it says that no hard drive exists! Do you think this could be a failing hard drive? Thanks!
 
the manufacturer may have an online or bootable utility for testing the drive. I'd try that. If they do and the dive is bad, you'll get an error code to beging the RMA process.
 
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