Restarts in middle of boot-up

[tonie1]

After I was updating Windows XP SP2 then I stop in the middel of the process then his is what happen. It spontaneously restarts in the middle of Windows start-up. I have Windows XP Pro SP1, and every time it gets to the part of booting up where the little gray bars fill up across the bottom of the screen (right before the Windows logo is displayed on a black background), it will all of a sudden just restart and go back to the BIOS screen. So basically, it can never get past this point, and fails to give me any sort of message or information as to what exactly the problem is and I can't even reformat my computer.



Here is what I've already done to try to troubleshoot this:

1. I tried to start up using "Last Known Good Configuration", but this didn't fix anything.

2. I tried to start up in Safe Mode, but again, the same problem.

3. I tried to enable Boot Logging so I could see at what point exactly the problem was happening, but it never seems to produce the boot log file...or at least I can't ever find it. After enabling Boot Logging, and the boot-up fails, I enter the Recovery Console and try to find the "C:\WINDOWS\Ntbtlog.txt" file, but it is never there.

4. Next I started to remove pieces of hardware from my system one-by-one, trying to boot up after each one to see if it fixed anything. Now the only things plugged into my motherboard are my video card and one hard drive. Still, same problem.

5. Then I decided to get drastic and starting disabling start-up Services using the Recovery Console. I wrote down all the services marked as "SERVICE_BOOT_START", meaning they get loaded during the boot phase. I disabled them one at a time and discovered that the problem was still happening when all of them were disabled, except for the "ATAPI" service. The catch there is that when I disabled "ATAPI" I got a Stop message during boot-up that said it could not continue because it couldn't find the "C:\WINDOWS\System32\Drivers\Ntfs.sys" file. So I can't say whether or not the "ATAPI" service is the one at fault for this spontaneous restarting business, because I have no way of checking for a successful boot-up when it is disabled.

Anyway, I've pretty much reached the end of my rope now, and I'm getting sick of re-installing Windows XP to fix this problem every time, since the true cause is something deeper than that. Any suggestions?

Here are my system specs (keep in mind only the video card and Maxtor 5T06H6 are hooked up at this point):
OS: Windows XP Pro SP2
Motherboard: M7NCD PRO
CPU: AMD AthlonXP 2500+ (not overclocked)
Memory: 512 Geil
Video Card: TI 4200
Sound Card: Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
Hard Drives: 2X160 GB Western Digital
DVD-RW: Ricoh

Thanks for reading all this

 

[bsobel]

Please do not cross post.

 

[The J]

Make sure you didn't disable Remote Procedure Call in the Recovery Console. It sounds like you've had this problem before with Windows XP. Have you tried finding a disk scanning utility? Maybe part of Windows is getting written to bad clusters.

 

[tonie1]

yeah, you're right, but how do I solve this?

 

[eydolic]

If pulling all the parts except the MB, Proc, RAM, VC, and HDD did not fix the problem, then it could be problem with one of those components causing files to become corrupt during the unmounting procedure. Just a guess. I'd start by running a hard drive test, like The J said. If the problem is the hard drive, but it doesn't have any PHYSICAL defects, you could probably get away with writing over the entire hard drive with zeros and doing a full format.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: tonie
After I was updating Windows XP SP2 then I stop in the middel of the process then his is what happen. It spontaneously restarts in the middle of Windows start-up. I have Windows XP Pro SP1, and every time it gets to the part of booting up where the little gray bars fill up across the bottom of the screen (right before the Windows logo is displayed on a black background), it will all of a sudden just restart and go back to the BIOS screen. So basically, it can never get past this point, and fails to give me any sort of message or information as to what exactly the problem is and I can't even reformat my computer.

I suggest putting your drivers back to the way they were (via Recovery Console) because you might've put yourself into a non-bootable situation with those changes.

(Almost) all the MS updates can be easily uninstalled by going in via recovery console and then going to the Windows directory, then the $NTUNINSTALL-SP2-or-similar-wording$ directory and running the uninstall file found in that directory's spuninst directory. It's called spuninst.txt - type "batch spuninst.txt" to uninstall whatever was most recently installed.

 

[imported_rhfactor]

when you were updating to SP2, did you tell it not to save backup files? You said you cancelled it and yet your OS is saying SP2. You can try doing a repair from the Windows XP install disks, not the repair console. The repair I'm talking about is after the install program checks for previous versions of windows.