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*MAJOR* Problems with WinXP Pro Bootup, need help PLEASE!

S

StandardCell

Senior member
I'm having BIG big trouble with WinXP on boot-up. A few hours ago, I had upgraded my McAfee anti-virus, and was playing a RealPlayer streams off the net. I walked away for a few minutes and heard the music stop. When I returned, the screen was blank and the monitor was receiving now signal! I'm thinking, random crash, who knows. I turned it off and rebooted, and I saw the WinXP Pro windows sign and the status bar filling up. After it turned black, I was expecting my login screen, but lo and behold - NOTHING. The screen went blank, and the monitor lost the signal. I'm thinking, wtf is going on???

So, I rebooted again. The screen came up with some listing of an error, saying that there was a problem starting, and offering to start Windows normally, as well as the last known good config and a few safe mode options. I tried last known good, and it went as far as showing my mouse cursor on a black screen, but no more. 🙁

I restarted AGAIN, but this time in Safe Mode, and it worked, but there was not much I could do but restart. Looked at the event viewer but NOTHING showed up. So, now what do I do? Tried a few more things including a defrag, but got nothing. One weird thing is that I saw in the Safe mode login that the Administrator login suddently appeared, as well as that I had one new mail message (but I don't use any mail clients in Windows, so I don't know how it happened).

I've applied all the most recent security packages from M$, including the uPNP fix, inspected log files, and nothing seems to reboot the computer besides manually halting the boot with F8 and going into Safe Mode. I am really stuck and I don't know what's going on. The only thing I can think of is that I was hacked, because I had recently put my computer in the DMZ of my router. But I'm pretty sure I turned off IIS and most other services. Can anyone help please???

System config is: Athlon XP 1800+, 512MB Ram, MSI K7T266A Pro2 RU mobo, SB Audigy Platinum EX, 3COM 3C905 NIC, IBM Deskstar 60GXP 60GB, WD 1000BB 100GB, ATI AIW Radeon 32MB AGP. Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

EDIT: I had some suspicions that the video drivers were somehow corrupted, so I downloaded and reinstalled them directly from ATI. I tried booting the computer in VGA mode a second time and it seemed to work BESIDES the fact that I couldn't change the resolution. When I did try to set it up to 1024x768 instead of the standard 640x480 VGA, the screen went dead as if there was no signal. Thoughts?
 
Just another point here - I was attempting to reinstall video drivers, and the computer was trying to end a program that was called "should not see me". I'm HIGHLY suspicious that something was inserted onto my system without my permission. Can anyone help?
 
I don't think that the board is dead. From what I discovered after much playing around is that WinXp works just fine, as long as I don't run it in anything other than 640x480 and don't use the ATI applications. It seems like a driver corruption issue. Everything else works - networking, sound, you name it. I get video corruption any time I attempt to change the resolution. It's damn strange, and I'm trying to avoid doing a reinstall...but I'm contacting ATI and M$ shortly...
 
you might want to try a system restore, If you do a search for it you will be able to pick a date when the computer was last known to be functioning. I hope that helps.
 
I had a similar problem yesterday in win98- well to the extent that I couldn't boot with win98 or xp. For mine, I couldn't run scandisk on the win98 partition and bc of that, winxp wouldn't boot on D either. And bec scandisk woudln't finish, I couldn't reinstall win 98 either.

Anyway, I found a program on one of the OS disks I have- can't remember which disk it's on (2k, xp, 98) - but it's called scanprog. It looked just like scandisk, but was able to repair the corrupt FAT in win98 where scandisk wouldn't. I had been trying to fix the FAT in scandisk for hours and it kept freezing but perhaps by doing it enough, it fixed it piece by piece. Anyway, that system is up and running with no data loss.

I think the scandisk equivalent in xp is CHKDSK

Well, this probably won't help much, but if it's a corrupted system file, maybe CHKDSK or scanprog might help fix it. I guess if you can get in via Safe Mode (I couldn't do that either yesterday), try running that.
Good luck!
 


<< you might want to try a system restore, If you do a search for it you will be able to pick a date when the computer was last known to be functioning. I hope that helps. >>



I've tried system restores from known points in time when the computer was working, but every time I do it, it locks up the first reboot, then on the second reboot it tells me it couldn't restore it. This is REALLY REALLY weird...
 
Well folks, after much frustration, I decided to back up all my data files and start again from the beginning. Blew everything away and reinstalled. I tried calling Small-and-Flaccid but the didn't want to help because I have an OEM version of XP Pro. :disgust: So, barring any future disasters, I'm reinstalling everything, getting Ghost to back it all up, and hope that I don't have to go through this rigamarole ever again.

Thanks everyone for your help.
 
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