Need Help - Computer Only Operatres (limited too!) in Safe Mode

[T.C.]

Hello everyone. I've got one huge mess of a computer issue compounding my
life right now.

Here goes:

Friday evening: Came back from dinner. I had my laptop on connected
wirelessly to the internet here at home. Had firefox open with a few sites
I didn't want to close and wanted to continue to browse when I got back
home. Computer and pointer froze so I held the power button down until it
shutoff. Powered back on. Get back into XP, go browsing agin, then
computer locks up again. Power off. Power on. This time, the COMPAQ logo
that usually covers up the POST screen is gone and instead, I get the POST
screen miniturized and repeated 8 times in a horizontal row in the middle of
the screen. Get the XP logo, everything seems fine, then computer screen
goes dark as it transitions into login screen. Screen goes from black to a
marbled black and white. Completely unreadable. Power off. Power on.
Same octuple mini POST screen, followed by the 30 second option screen that
is now misspelled! Wandows shows up intead of windows and system is now
sqstee and other crazy character substitutions. Needless to say, nothing
I've done alleviated this issue so far.

However I can boot into safe mode and the screen is readable. Using
safemode with networking lets me get on to the internet if I'm plugged into
the LAN on the router. I have symantec corporate edition anti-virus (school
provided AV), run it at full scan, no results for anything malicious. Run
windows defender. Nothing. Run CHKDSK from command line. Nothing bad
reported. Everything looks ok, but I can't use XP normally. I used HP chat
support. They had me remove the HD, and swap the RAM modules. Didn't fix
anything. They told me to get help from an HP support center. I go to best
buy. Guy at counter inserts his USB flash drive and runs some diagnostic
software. After it finishes it says it finds a trojan, but the guy clears
the screen before I can see the name of it. Starts accusing me that I got
this from using torrents since their software shows a list of any P2P type
software like azureus and limewire. Anyway, he says I'll need to reformat
and flash the BIOS (seems to imply that XP and the BIOS are corrupted).
Unfortunately my recovery disks are back at school (I'm on winter break).

This time, I tried using panda security's online scanner. It only found
cookies as threats and that damn viewpoint viewer program that always
installs at the opening of an internet window. No trojan. No virus. I
don't know what the hell is going on. So i download a trial version of
NOD32 (kid with the geek squad says norton doesn't cut it, use nod32)
however it's an .msi file and when I doubleclick to install I get the
follwing error:

"The system administrator has set policies to prevent this installation"

I logged in to safe mode under the administrator account. What gives?
Anyway, I start looking through the administrative tools section under the
control panel and use another computer here to research this error message
and work arounds and enable this and disabling that. Nothing would give me
the proper "policies" to run this installation. I even tried this
CTRL+ALT+DEL x2 thing at the login screen for safemode. Didn't work either.
I also downloaded the BIOS update from the HP support website to see if I
could just flash the BIOS and hoped that restored some semblance of order.
Then I get this error message:

"Cannot Load Driver 'lists driver file location'. Please check your
accounts. If you have no adminstrator privelege, please login again! The
system cannot find the file specified. Error code: 2"

It seems I'm stuck at the moment. I have no idea if formatting and
reinstalling XP will let me flash the BIOS later or if there is a work
around or what.

If anyone knows a way to give me unilateral control over my laptop, I'd
appreciate this or knows another way I could flash my BIOS I'd appreciate
the help.

Thanks!

T.C.

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

Recovery Console might let you flash, but admin permissions might keep you
out there too. If you can't flash it out, you will probably need BIOS
hardware replacement. With a laptop, that might be costly. I would try a
bootable dos floppy, and a flasher that runs in dos.

 

[T.C.]

The flash is a BIOS update provided by HP. It seems to have a GUI called
"winphlash" that brings up a screen with buttons to either flash or exit. I
never had issues running this flasher when XP worked properly in the past.
I was able to extract out the files that are used in this .exe program, but
even runing from the DOS batch file, I get the same error about it not
having permission and that it can't find the SYS file (that's in the same
folder as the batch file, as I can see it). Would putting these files on a
floppy allow me to flash from DOS?

I don't know where I would find a DOS flasher for my BIOS. My laptop does
not have a floppy drive but a CD-ROM drive. Would that suffice or would a
USB floppy drive work?

T.C.

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

If you have something that gets in at the BIOS startup, permissions are
probably unchangeable after that.

Description of File Sharing and Permissions in Windows XP (Q304040):
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q304/0/40.ASP

 

[T.C.]

Well, looks like the laptop has finally died. I had been using it in
safemode with networking for close to 12 hours before I shut down. When I
went back to start it up again. Nothing. Just a black screen with the lcd
backlight powered on. No mini-POST screen, no XP logo, no safemode, no
processing, nothing.

Is it dead or can something revive this thing?

T.C.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Well, looks like the laptop has finally died. I had been using it in
safemode with networking for close to 12 hours before I shut down. When I
went back to start it up again. Nothing. Just a black screen with the lcd
backlight powered on. No mini-POST screen, no XP logo, no safemode, no
processing, nothing.

Is it dead or can something revive this thing?

It certainly sounds like a hardware issue, not a Windows one.

 

[Larry Burdette]

Have Vista Ultimate on my Primary hard drive. I have loaded XP Pro on a
second hard drive. How can I move Windows Mail emails to Outlook Express 6
on the XP drive?

This is needed because I've given up on Vista after struggling with it for 6
months. Windows Explorer crashes every hour, many of my programs can't be
run, Mouse pointer freezes often, hardware is obsolete, and that's just the
major annoyances.

I've tried exporting Windows Mail to a folder and then importing to OE on
the XP drive, but I get a message saying that the files cannot be found.

I'm afraid that the Windows files are no longer dbx extensions.

Larry

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

Windows mail files are *.eml files that will open in a 'read' window in OE.
These can then be saved to an OE folder.