WinXP cannot start up?

[EvanGeliSt]

I had a problem earlier with my computer when I installed a new fan.. and the computer simply wouldn't start up.

Followed the advice of a fellow AT'er and Removed the battery off the mobo, and put it back in after a few seconds. This got me to at least the bios, where I could use all the default settings.

But I have another problem now, by resetting the CMOS(removing batt), did I make XP unaccessible? I got to the part where you have the intro sound to XP and it shut down on itself... I really hope I dun have to reinstall XP on that HDD coz a lot of data is still inside.

Pls offer some advice to a poor guy who's been working on this for the past 5 hours...

Thanks!

 

[Drewpy]

have you tried booting off your winXP cd, and run the repair installation option?

As a last ditch, you could re-install winXP over the current install. Hopefully this will allow your to backup your data, then format your hdd and do a clean install.

 

[Lopyswine]

agreed.... i had some probs with my board.. did a boot from cd and reinstalled xp over my old one... was a little hairy but it let me back up my data..

 

[igiveup]

Well, a repair install is an option that you should use, but only when you can't recover normally. Try booting into XP in safe mode by pressing F8 and holding it until it pops up a screen with some boot options on it. It should come up right after the BIOS screen. Once there choose safe mode and then continue to boot. Once booting is finished then you need to set your computer to NOT automatically reboot after an error. This will give you a blue screen of death without it automatically rebooting, which you want. To set this, right click on My Computer and then select properties. Choose the Advanced tab on the right and then the Settings button under the Startup and Recovery section. Under the System Failure section 3/4 of the way down this page, uncheck the Automatically Restart box. Reboot your computer and boot normally.

When your computer dies now, it should give you an error message telling you what kind of error you are getting. Something like IRQ_LESS_OR_NOT_EQUAL is one message, yours will probably different. You might get lucky enough to have a filename listed if its being caused by a driver. There will also probably be some numbers like this: STOP: 0x0000007E (0xC00000008, 0x000000005, and on and on.) Record at least the first of these numbers after the STOP message. Look em up on Microsoft's Knowledgebase in the support section of MS' site. Chances are somebody else is having the same problem with it also. If you have issues you can even post them here and get a hand with finding out what they mean, but we do need more exact information about what was going wrong. Good luck.