Help me fix this PC

[KK]

A coworker brought in a sony vaio desktop computer that his brother in law has been having trouble with it. It has XP home installed on it. when it boots up it goes past the windows xp loading page with the little bar scrolling left to right, then it wants to check the disk, after it checks the disk, it goes to a blue error screen that flashes up there very, very briefly and the reboots. I've tried taking pictures of the error screen but its just too damn fast. It does the same thing if I bypass the disk checking. If I try booting it up in safe mode, the last file it displays loading is AGP440.sys, it then sits there about couple minutes then just reboots, no error screen or nothing. I have no recovery disks or anything, what should I try?

Thanks,
KK

 

[DanJ]

Try a repair install if you have an XP CD handy, which judging by your last sentence you do not. The Sony must have come with a repair disk though, no?

 

[Mill]

Pron.

 

[Kenny]

I've had problems like that before. Usually I got an "nv_disp" error or something like that. I'd go try a clean reinstall.

 

[Rallispec]

n/m

 

[KK]

Originally posted by: DanJ
Try a repair install if you have an XP CD handy, which judging by your last sentence you do not. The Sony must have come with a repair disk though, no?

It probably did, but he didn't bring anything in with it. Any suggestions?

KK

 

[JarJarBinks77]

Format and reinstall with stolen copy of xp pro.

You knew this was comming but you didnt want to hear it.

 

[dighn]

no

anyway i remeber that same problem while installing win2k on a friends computer but i forgot what was the problem/how i solved it.

 

[conjur]

Can you boot into Safe Mode at all or it hangs on that AGP440.sys?

I had that during the beta of XP on a system w/an unsupported video card.

1st thing I usually do on XP/2000 is turn off that option to automatically reboot on crashes.

 

[NogginBoink]

First, take this thread to Operating Systems.

Second, agp440.sys has nothing to do with the problem. When you boot to safe mode, ntldr prints out the names of the boot start drivers as it loads them into RAM, and agp440 is usually the last one that ntldr loads from disk.

Third, the machine is rebooting because it's blue screening and is set to auto reboot. To get the STOP code, you need to put on a parallel install of XP, then start regedit, load the SYSTEM registry hive of the original OS, find the currentcontrolset by looking at what select\default is equal to, then in that controlset go to control\crashcontrol\autoreboot and set that to 0, then boot back into the original OS to get the STOP code.

Then, once you get the STOP code, troubleshoot as normal.

Moral of the story: autoreboot is bad. Unless you have a server in a remote location with no one around to press the reset switch, turn off autoreboot.