"How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting"
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545/en-us
Steven
"johng7" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message news

EA5FD3E-BA14-41FC-AB13-(E-Mail Removed)...
> Hi all,
>
> win xp home suddenly kind of locked up. It appeared that my norton was
> consuming quite a bit of resources but it kind of died down and remained
> locked up... about all I could pull up was the win task manager.
>
> I rebooted and went to the screen before the
> windows xp screen (in summary) 'Windows cannot start up because of a resent
> software or hardware change. another problem could be that windows
> experianced a power failure during start up'. that is what it basically said,
> and it gave me a couple options:
>
> safe mode
> safe mode with networking
> safe mode with command prompt
> revert to last working settings
> run windows normally
> (these aren't the exact words, but again, in summary)
>
> no matter which I select I'm looped back to this page after win tried to
> load for a few seconds.
>
> I does appear that the primary and slave HD are being acknowledged and the
> bios seems to be loading fine.
>
> Any assistance is greatly appreciated!!!!
>
> Thanks in advance,
> j
>