Reboots continuously.......loops.

[scott]

Running xp home on a 40gb ntfs partition. No other os or
partitions on primary (drive 0) drive. Have secondary
(drive 1) 7.8 gb drive.

System boots only to black backgroud "Windows XP" screen
for 3 to 5 seconds. Then reboots. ........continuously.

What I've tried.

1. Safe mode.........same result.........that is gets to
black xp boot screen and ....reboots.
2. Last known good............same result.
3.Tried booting of cd-rom installation disk.
Choose "repair"......automatically takes me to recovery
consule...........does not ask for password or identify
system dir (winnt). I type "dir" I get (sorry not at home
at the moment) something to the affect that it can't see
anything....returns to c:\.
4. Typed in fixmbr.........got warning that boot sector or
partition (again......sorry not at home) is not
recognized............so I stopped. (whew)...........and
am researching.

It's as if the boot sector or partition table is
corrupted. So it doesn't recognize it, so it wants to
write a new one.

So ............my question is.......because I'm obviously
rusty. What is the difference bewteen fixmbr vs. fixboot?
Isn't the partition table part of the boot sector? I
assume fixmbr simply writes a new mbr. If
so..........where does it get the copy it uses from? A
default one? Isn't there a copy of the bootsector or
partition table in the boot sector. Or am I thinking a fat
partition?

Don't want to hose myself. I can blow this partition away
if necessasary (backups of realllllllllllly important
stuff is on 2nd drive...................just for this
reason.)

But ........like all of us...........would rather not
spend a day basically recovering. Reinstalling all apps etc

I will be back here within an hour or so to give specifics
on fixboot and fixmbr warnings after getting home. Working
from laptop now. Machine is primary desktop at home.

 

[Honjo]

What is the difference bewteen fixmbr vs. fixboot?

Fixmbr rewrites mbr and fixboot rewrites boot sector. Difference between
mbr and boot sector in simple term is that mbr includes instructions
which partition to jump to in boot process, and boot sector being
located in a partition includes instructions to load a target OS to
boot.

The symtoms as described insdicates that cause of the problem is not
corrupted mbr nor boot sector files. I would suspect corrupted system
file(s) or bad RAM. To correct corrupted file you may try chkdsk. To
determine if RAM is bad you can try this software:
http://www.memtest86.com/#download0

Kaz