M
miskairal
If you've seen me here before you'll know I can't make a long story
short - sorry.
My pc is old, with an Intel (R) celeron 2.0GHz and Windows XP Home.
I had trouble with SP3 causing my pc to hang at the windows splash
screen several months ago so uninstalled it and left it a while.
July 12th - Partitioned and formatted a 2 year old Samsung 200GB drive
and installed XP Home SP2 and then immediately installed SP3. All has
been great. I think all updates were done as I had it set on automatic
for a couple of days. I then changed it to notify me but not download as
I am on a low data limit with my internet.
I got notified of some updates early last week and I'm sure I installed
them all. I do not have microsoft Office so those would not have been done.
On Friday the 15th I got notified again of downloads available and took
a quick look, thought I'd seen the same ones before but with words like
critical written everywhere I just told it to go ahead and download and
install. As I was going out I shut the computer down rather than reboot.
Came home and tried to restart but got the screen asking if I wanted to
start in Normal mode, safe mode etc.
If I select normal mode it gets as far as a very dull/faded windows
splash screen and hangs.
If I select Safe mode with or without networking - on two occasions it
booted to safe mode and I was able to do a system restore, first one to
the 15th, early morning, didn't change anything so I went back further
to the 14th. On both occasions I was told the restore was successful but
I was unable to get into normal mode.
After this I can not get into safe mode, it loads drivers and gets to
"Press ESC to cancel loading SPTD". Whether I press ESC or not it just
goes round in a loop detecting the drives again and giving me the safe
mode options.
I also tried putting the XP disk in - it started copying files and then
hung.
Opened up the case and it was pretty dirty inside so a computer friend
cleaned it with compressed air and then 3 times in a row it booted up
fine. Then our power tripped out yesterday (17th) and it's back to where
I was - continually getting to the safe mode options screen.
I have searched and searched but all I find is stuff about the SP3 and
AMD problem. I can find nothing about problems with the August updates.
I am back on my 5 year old Seagate hard drive (which I luckily had set
as a slave and hadn't formatted) with the Samsung disconnected. I shall
try connecting it in as a slave and see if it's working. I have booted
this seagate drive about 4 times and it's not missed a beat so I figures
it's got to be the Samsung drive or the updates??
* Could the updates be the problem?
* If so, how can I uninstall them if I can't boot the drive?
Any other help would be greatly appreciated as it took me many days to
get that drive with XP SP3 how I wanted it and I really don't want to
format and start again. I'm not a computer guru so KISS.
Cheers
Robyn
short - sorry.
My pc is old, with an Intel (R) celeron 2.0GHz and Windows XP Home.
I had trouble with SP3 causing my pc to hang at the windows splash
screen several months ago so uninstalled it and left it a while.
July 12th - Partitioned and formatted a 2 year old Samsung 200GB drive
and installed XP Home SP2 and then immediately installed SP3. All has
been great. I think all updates were done as I had it set on automatic
for a couple of days. I then changed it to notify me but not download as
I am on a low data limit with my internet.
I got notified of some updates early last week and I'm sure I installed
them all. I do not have microsoft Office so those would not have been done.
On Friday the 15th I got notified again of downloads available and took
a quick look, thought I'd seen the same ones before but with words like
critical written everywhere I just told it to go ahead and download and
install. As I was going out I shut the computer down rather than reboot.
Came home and tried to restart but got the screen asking if I wanted to
start in Normal mode, safe mode etc.
If I select normal mode it gets as far as a very dull/faded windows
splash screen and hangs.
If I select Safe mode with or without networking - on two occasions it
booted to safe mode and I was able to do a system restore, first one to
the 15th, early morning, didn't change anything so I went back further
to the 14th. On both occasions I was told the restore was successful but
I was unable to get into normal mode.
After this I can not get into safe mode, it loads drivers and gets to
"Press ESC to cancel loading SPTD". Whether I press ESC or not it just
goes round in a loop detecting the drives again and giving me the safe
mode options.
I also tried putting the XP disk in - it started copying files and then
hung.
Opened up the case and it was pretty dirty inside so a computer friend
cleaned it with compressed air and then 3 times in a row it booted up
fine. Then our power tripped out yesterday (17th) and it's back to where
I was - continually getting to the safe mode options screen.
I have searched and searched but all I find is stuff about the SP3 and
AMD problem. I can find nothing about problems with the August updates.
I am back on my 5 year old Seagate hard drive (which I luckily had set
as a slave and hadn't formatted) with the Samsung disconnected. I shall
try connecting it in as a slave and see if it's working. I have booted
this seagate drive about 4 times and it's not missed a beat so I figures
it's got to be the Samsung drive or the updates??
* Could the updates be the problem?
* If so, how can I uninstall them if I can't boot the drive?
Any other help would be greatly appreciated as it took me many days to
get that drive with XP SP3 how I wanted it and I really don't want to
format and start again. I'm not a computer guru so KISS.
Cheers
Robyn