Can't reboot a crashed WinXPHome

[Guest]

My computer crashed...something about too much bootable information. I
believe it happened when my son was downloading music.

It won't reboot and does not allow me to get to a carrot where I can type in
reformat. I just have the blue screen of death and hitting F8 to enter
safe mode returns me to the blue screen. Any ideas?

 

[Jon Anderson]

There is a free program called BartPE that you can use to boot into a
windows like env. You can either get your files off and rebuild the
system, or you can try to fix it from there. You will need to get on a
computer that has a CD burner and boot from the CD on the current
problem PC. Also if you have a hardware Diagnostics tool, I would run
that. I had a problem kind of like that on a pc here at work, it
turned out the RAM was bad.

 

[Guest]

Thanks, I'll try that.

I think I can off load my files onto a memory stick.

The PC in question has a CD drawer, so I think I can use the Win XP disk and
try booting from the disk.. I just hesitate to do a clean install and lose
all the data, not to mention all the time it would take to download and
install the SPs.