boot up takes 2 hours.

[JG]

My friend has a Dell running Win XP Home. They keep getting a pop up
window with the message that there is file waiting to be written to the
CD-RW drive. If you click on the message balloon, another window opens
*briefly* showing a media file. It's too fast to see much. If you try to
open any program the first pop up keeps coming up. They shut down the
machine but it took almost 2 hours for Windows to come up. During the 2
hours the screen was black with the white 'cursor' up in the left
corner. We tried a cold boot into start up options hoping to get to Safe
Mode, but can't.

Any ideas?

 

[Barry Guyer]

My friend has a Dell running Win XP Home. They keep getting a pop up
window with the message that there is file waiting to be written to the
CD-RW drive. If you click on the message balloon, another window opens
*briefly* showing a media file. It's too fast to see much. If you try to
open any program the first pop up keeps coming up. They shut down the
machine but it took almost 2 hours for Windows to come up. During the 2
hours the screen was black with the white 'cursor' up in the left
corner. We tried a cold boot into start up options hoping to get to Safe
Mode, but can't.

Any ideas?

Which Dell computer has your friend got? In the absence of
information, try the following:

Do a cold boot.
During the initial boot process, press F12 when you see the options
F2 and F12 in the top right corner of the screen. With luck, you
will get up a black screen with a number of options - the first of
which is highlighted. Hit the return key.
The computer will start to reboot. When the screen goes black, hit the
F8 key at about 3 second intervals. If your timing is right, you will
get a new menu screen with a large number of options, one of which is
Safe Mode, another of which is Safe Mode with networking, and another
is Last Known Good Configuration.
Hope this helps.

 

[JG]

For some reason pressing any of the 'F' keys specific to that computer
(Dell) does nothing.