Unable To Boot Windows

[Joel Zimmerman]

Hello, I'm new here. Thanks for reading my post.

This morning, I switched on my PC and it didn't boot up Windows XP fully. It showed the splash screen with the scrolling loading bars. Thinking that it would take a bit longer, I left it for over two hours and it was still stuck on the loading screen. I resorted to many methods that may have inhibited a full boot. I removed all of my USB connected devices including my mouse and removed my slave hard drive but still, no dice. Forums on the internet suggested that I should use my Windows XP disc and use the recovery console, but it just gets stuck before it even comes up with the options. I left it for almost an hour but it was still the same.

Is there any other possible way of repairing Windows that I might be able to do? The methods on numerous sites I researched don't seem to help :(

Thanks in advance.

[Alan2273]

Have you tried a repair install?.

/>http://www.windowsforum.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=10455

[Joel Zimmerman]

My Windows XP disc doesn't help either. It hangs before I get to choose what I would like to do :(

[wide-load]

First check hardware setup (BIOS) to make sure your voltages and temperatures are correct. Are all of your fans running?

Then check to see that all of your backplane plug in cards, memory sticks, and cables are seated good.

If none of the above help then try stripping the system of everything not essential to booting. This includes most backplane cards and cables to other devices. Usually, all you need is a video card and boot drive to boot. Unplug the IDE and/or SATA cables for everything but the one for the boot drive. If you have a floppy drive unplug it's cable as well. Be sure to make notes of how everything that you remove goes back together, including cable polarity. Depending on the age of your system cables will have a stripe to indicate polarity. If you have more than one memory stick, try booting with only one. I've seen the case where, if you memory voltage is a little off, it will boot with only one stick. If that helps, contact your memory vendor to find the optimal voltage.

If you do get it to boot with minimal hardware start adding things back, one at a time, until you find what is hanging it. When it hangs then the device is defective or setup wrong.

Hope this helps.

[wide-load]

First check hardware setup (BIOS) to make sure your voltages and temperatures are correct. Are all of your fans running?

Then check to see that all of your backplane plug in cards, memory sticks, and cables are seated good.

If none of the above help then try stripping the system of everything not essential to booting. This includes most backplane cards and cables to other devices. Usually, all you need is a video card and boot drive to boot. Unplug the IDE and/or SATA cables for everything but the one for the boot drive. If you have a floppy drive unplug it's cable as well. Be sure to make notes of how everything that you remove goes back together, including cable polarity. Depending on the age of your system cables will have a stripe to indicate polarity. If you have more than one memory stick, try booting with only one. I've seen the case where, if you memory voltage is a little off, it will boot with only one stick. If that helps, contact your memory vendor to find the optimal voltage.

If you do get it to boot with minimal hardware start adding things back, one at a time, until you find what is hanging it. When it hangs then the device is defective or setup wrong.

Hope this helps.

Also go back to a PS2 mouse and keyboard.

[Joel Zimmerman]

I removed everything from my PC that wasn't relevant to booting. I too out two sticks of RAM out and left one in, unplugged my CD and floppy drive, took out my PCI soundcard and removed any other connected devices such as USBs, keyboard and USB mouse. My PC won't go past the BIOS check if there is no keyboard detected, so I plugged my keyboard back in. Apart from that, it still doesn't get past the Windows XP splash screen. I saw nothing wron with my BIOS settings, I even resotored them to default just incase. The computer is perfectly capable of booting with a bootable CD as I had used Knoppix earlier on. I'll continue to troubleshoot with my hardware but could it be possible that the booting script coudl have been corrupted? When I booted my PC on that morning, it said it couldn't boot because no hard drive was detected. It has happened before but it's very rare. A push on the power and IDE cable after turning it off does the trick.

[wide-load]

I removed everything from my PC that wasn't relevant to booting. I too out two sticks of RAM out and left one in, unplugged my CD and floppy drive, took out my PCI soundcard and removed any other connected devices such as USBs, keyboard and USB mouse. My PC won't go past the BIOS check if there is no keyboard detected, so I plugged my keyboard back in. Apart from that, it still doesn't get past the Windows XP splash screen. I saw nothing wron with my BIOS settings, I even resotored them to default just incase. The computer is perfectly capable of booting with a bootable CD as I had used Knoppix earlier on. I'll continue to troubleshoot with my hardware but could it be possible that the booting script coudl have been corrupted? When I booted my PC on that morning, it said it couldn't boot because no hard drive was detected. It has happened before but it's very rare. A push on the power and IDE cable after turning it off does the trick.

It could be that your hard drive is "flaky". You might try reconnecting the floppy and booting an emergency boot floppy. At the dos prompt type "scandisk C: /s" (without the quote marks). This will check your hard drive, with a surface scan. If the drive has errors your best bet might be to put a new drive in and reinstall Windows. After you get a néw copy of Windows working, you could put your old drive in as a slave and possibly recover My Documents and other data, depending on the damage to your old drive.

Since you told me you could boot something else, after pushing on the IDE and power cables it makes your hard drive suspect. It may be hanging up, when you are trying to boot your current copy of Windows.

Another check of the rest of your hardware would be to go to ubuntu.com, download a copy of ubuntu, burn that image to a bootable CD and run ubuntu from a LiveCD. If ubuntu runs, that will tell you that the rest of your hardware is OK and pretty much points to the drive as the problem. If you get ubuntu running it should mount your hard drive and you can look at the files on it and see if they make sense. Ubuntu comes with OpenOffice, which should open most Word and Excell files.

[Joel Zimmerman]

I think the culprit could be just that, a flaky and/or failing hard drive as its been slow lately and it was made in 2003, though when I booted up Ubuntu it worked fine. I can still access all of my files on the hard drive, could just be one sector that's bad. For now, I'll use one of my ancient 20GB hard drives and install Ubuntu onto it and make my failing drive a slave so I can access my files. But I've searched the net about the problem and it seems that most other people managed to fix their XP splash screen not getting stuck.