A
anojjona
I understand that the standard wisdom if Windows XP doesn't start up
is to wipe the drive and start fresh with a reinstall (or at the very
least uninstall and reinstall Windows). But suppose I don't want to
do that. Are there any ways to figure what actually goes wrong in the
startup and troubleshoot that? I know it sounds crazy and "goes
against the grain," but I'm just wondering: Is it actually possible?
And are there any tools that can help?
Here's the situation:
* Sony Vaio
* Starts up in safe mode only
* "Last known configuration" startup doesn't work
* Does not start up even with "diagnostic" configuration in msconfig
(except in safe mode)
* I had never set up restore points, so system restore is no use
* When I look at the event viewer, the only obvious errors I see are
that certain things didn't load because I'm in safe mode
* ntbtlog.txt doesn't seem that useful, but maybe I'm not reading it
right. It only shows drivers that it loaded and didn't load, and from
what I can tell, this is probably just what happened when booting in
safe mode; I can't see anything that would show where it fails.
* There's a blue screen with some text that flashes with some text
during start-up. I'm wondering if it's worthwhile to take a movie of
the screen as it's starting up to find out what that says. However, I
don't have a camcorder...just a digital camera and I don't if the
movie would be high-enough resolution for this method to work.
Anyhow, you'd think that there must be some way for Windows to
actually log what's going on somewhere...to record some information
about where its failing and when. Haven't they ever thought about
this? Anybody have any suggestions?
Thanks!
is to wipe the drive and start fresh with a reinstall (or at the very
least uninstall and reinstall Windows). But suppose I don't want to
do that. Are there any ways to figure what actually goes wrong in the
startup and troubleshoot that? I know it sounds crazy and "goes
against the grain," but I'm just wondering: Is it actually possible?
And are there any tools that can help?
Here's the situation:
* Sony Vaio
* Starts up in safe mode only
* "Last known configuration" startup doesn't work
* Does not start up even with "diagnostic" configuration in msconfig
(except in safe mode)
* I had never set up restore points, so system restore is no use
* When I look at the event viewer, the only obvious errors I see are
that certain things didn't load because I'm in safe mode
* ntbtlog.txt doesn't seem that useful, but maybe I'm not reading it
right. It only shows drivers that it loaded and didn't load, and from
what I can tell, this is probably just what happened when booting in
safe mode; I can't see anything that would show where it fails.
* There's a blue screen with some text that flashes with some text
during start-up. I'm wondering if it's worthwhile to take a movie of
the screen as it's starting up to find out what that says. However, I
don't have a camcorder...just a digital camera and I don't if the
movie would be high-enough resolution for this method to work.
Anyhow, you'd think that there must be some way for Windows to
actually log what's going on somewhere...to record some information
about where its failing and when. Haven't they ever thought about
this? Anybody have any suggestions?
Thanks!