Windows XP Pro Not Booting

[Thawk]

My wife was just looking at a web page and the computer rebooted itself on its own. When it tries to reboot, it gets to the Windows XP graphic with the then for a spilt second I can see a blue screen flash and then it goes to the post screen and then it stops at a window saying that "We apologize for the inconvenience, but Windows did not start successfuly. I tried to open it in safe mode from this window and it just loops back after a while. I booted it from a floppy but I could not get to the c drive. I don't know what to try next.

Help! We have a lot of pictures on this computer that are not yet backed up. Let me know if there is any additional information that might help.

It is the Garnet system in my rigs.

 

[Paperlantern]

this spontaneously happens to some NTFS systems (the fact that its ntfs is why you couldnt see the drive with your boot disk, ntfs drives are more secure, your not supposed to be able to read the files with a simple boot disk) see if you can stare at the screen until it reboots, see if you can catch the blue screen, my hunch is it mught be a UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME issue. if thats the case, boot to your windows xp boot cd and opt to go into the recovery console, at the command prompt, jsut type "chkdsk /r" without the quotes fo course, that will take quite some time, but theres a good chance you should be able to continue using your computer just fine when its done

 

[Thawk]

Paperlantern,

I could not for the life of me catch what the blue screen was saying but I went ahead and booted from the CDROM and did the chkdsk /r. The first time it ran to 6% and stopped saying that there were unrecoverable items. I tried to run it again and got the blue screen and this time it stayed.
It says;

MEMORY_MANAGEMENT

If this is the first time you have seen this stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:

Check to make sure that any hardware or software is properly installed. If this is a new installation, ask your hardware or software manufacturer for any windows update that you might need.

If problems continue, disable or remove any newly installed hardware or software. Disable BIOS memory options such as cashing or shadowing. If you need to use safe mode to remove or disable components, restart your computer, press F8 to select Advanced Startup Options, and then select safe mode.

Technical information:

*** STOP: 0x0000001A (0x00000781, 0xC0313944, 0x00000000, 0xE10DA044)

I have not added any new hardware or software.
Thanks!

 

[Thawk]

Now when I try to boot from the hard drive as it's posted it stops and says;

A disk error occured
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

 

[Thawk]

This is wierd, after I opened the case and pulled and reconnected all of the connections it is almost like my harddrive is not getting power. Help!!!

 

[mechBgon]

I see from the rig specs that you have the infamous IBM "Deathstar" 75GXP. What I would do is put that drive into another Win2000/XP computer as a secondary drive, and rescue the files you want to save.

 

[Thawk]

So you believe that the drive is smoked.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Thawk
So you believe that the drive is smoked.

Don't give up, it could be a mobo problem instead. Try putting it in a different system as a second drive and see if you can retrieve your data. Nothing to lose by trying, right?

 

[Thawk]

Thanks mechgon, I'll give that a try and let you know.