Windows (even safe mode) won't boot

[Marshall Dudley]

Because of reliability problems and problems getting Windows 98 to boot
reliably, I upgraded to Windows XP which everyone said would get rid of
the reliability problems about 2 months ago. I also ran a full virus
check and optimized the drive at that time.

The first boot after installing it hung, but every other boots since
then have worked fine until a few days ago. Then I did a cold boot and
it hung on a black screen. I rebooted again, and selected normal boot
and it booted fine.

Well I tried to reboot this morning with a warm reboot, and it hung with
a black screen. It was hanging within the first second of starting
drive access. I selected normal boot several times, but it hung every
time. I then tried booting to safe mode, and it hung after display the
iomdisk.sys load. I tried this numberous times with the same result.
Since that was an iomega driver, I unplugged my iomega CD rom R/W drive,
and it booted into safe mode. So I did a warm boot and it was back to
not booting again, and it was still hanging at the iomdisk.sys command
(or just following it). I eventually got it to boot into safe mode by
repeated attempts, and renamed the iomdisk.sys to iomdisk.bak. Well, it
still would not boot into safe or normal mode, but was now stopping on
agp440.sys. Many attempts with the iomega drive connected and not
connected and I was not able to boot for the next hour.

I then put in Norton CD disk and started it looking for a virus. After
about an hour of this and it finding nothing, my son came over with a
floppy XP boot disk. I broke out of the batch file it was running and
renamed the iomdisk.bak back to iomdisk.sys. He entered ctl-alt-del to
get out of the norton and then it booted up fine in normal mode with the
iomega drive connected.

I am afraid to reboot again, but plan on working on this this weekend.
I need some advice since once I try to reboot and it refuses, I will not
be able to get on the net again, my other computer does not work either,
it says keyboard missing, press F3 to continue!

I am running a compaq with 128 Meg of memory. I have Norton antivirus
installed. I have installed NO software or drivers that would account
for it suddenly not working, plus it still will not boot if I select the
last known good configuration.

Someone suggested that I rn scandisk, but I get a file not found when I
try that from dos.

Any advise would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Marshall

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

It does seem that you are having some kind of driver/file/hard drive read,
etc, problem. My try at a fix would be to start from that floppy boot, go to
'r' for recovery console, and run the disk scan for XP, type:

CHKDSK /R

 

[Marshall Dudley]

Won't do it, it says that you cannot do a chkdsk from dos. Anyway, after lots
of attempts I can occasionally get it to boot. I did the chkdisk /R, and it
said I had to reboot to get it to work. Did that and when it did successfully
reboot, it said no errors were found. Still wouldn't boot reliably. So I ran
Norton Disk Doctor, and it said that it found errors in the file structure but
could not fix it because Windows was loaded, and said to beboot and it would fix
it on boot up. When I was finally able to get it to boot, Norton did not
execute but instead it ran a chkdsk again, and once again reported no problems.

So I reinstalled windows. Except for the installation forgetting that the CD
rom drive it was using was E: and accessing F: in the middle so I had to tell it
Drive F: dozens of times, it seemed to go ok. It changed my screen resolution
from 600X800 to 480X640 for some reason, but that was easy enough to restore.

Anyway after 5 hours of work, I find that even with reinstalling Windows, it
still locks up most of the time on boot. The lock up is after the last driver is
loaded (if you are going to safe mode you can see them load), and just before
the screen comes up saying that Windows is loading, so for a normal boot I end
up with a black screen, no disk activity, and no interrupt servicing..


I also ran a complete virus scan of all the files on the drive, and it found 0
infections.


Does anyone have any other ideas. Unfortunately I deleted the backup of my
Windows 98 installation on one or two days before this started happening to free
up some disk room so I no longer have an option of going back to the earlier
version.. Is there anything I can do to ever make Windows boot reliably, this
is even worse than the 98 version that would typically take 5 attempts to get
up.

Marshall

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

You are seeing some hardware failure, and the most likely suspect is the
video card, or driver. If I were doing it, I would try changing out
hardware, or testing it in other systems, etc, trying to isolate which
hardware was the problem.

There are tools available in XP for general hardware info. Start/Run, type
MSINFO32.EXE (and DEVMGMT.MSC)

 

[SM]

This is most likely a hard drive going bad - act quickly and save your
data to a known good drive. use Ghost, which will attempt to copy even
with bad sectors.

I think what has happened here is that your drive is failing (bad
sectors), and your MFT resides on some of these bad sectors. Therefore
you get stuck on boot-up because the OS encounters corrupted MFT and
doesn't know how to find the file.

iomdisk.sys is just a co-incidence here, and not the real culprint.
Your hard drive is the real culprit.