Windows Vista is not starting up

[Guest]

I came home from class, turned my PC on, and it booted up. It got to the
loading screen (With the Microsoft logo and the moving green bar) and then it
went black, and I saw a flash of the blue screen, and then it restarted to
the startup screen. It then went to the "Windows did not start properly" And
so I selected 'startup repair'. It then went to the green bar screen, and
then went black. My mouse pointer appeared and I could move it, but aside
from that, nothing.

I restarted after a few minutes and tried to start in safe mode, but again a
quick flash of the bluescreen and then it restarted. I tried to do the system
restore, but similar to the black screen with the pointer, except this screen
was blue. The pointer moved with my mouse, but nothing.

I called HP support, they had me check the BIOS, and everything seemed fine.
They said I had to use a system restore disc they are sending me in the mail
(which will knock out my files) and I am wondering if there's a way to fix
this, or are my documents screwed?

Also what could cause this? How do I prevent it? I just switched from my
prefered anti-virus (Kapersky) to one that my university prefered (McAffee)
which I needed to install otherwise I could not access the internet. Is it a
virus?

 

[Daze N. Knights]

I ran into these same symptoms recently with an old HP laptop running
XP. The customer had also talked to HP about it to no avail. I tried
everything I could think of, including doing a complete system recovery
using the set of recovery CDs that came with the laptop. Although it
kept looking like I was getting somewhere, everything failed at some
point and I could never make it to the desktop. Finally, I popped in a
bootup CD with Spinrite on it to check the hard drive and the first
thing that it said was to turn off the computer immediately because the
hard drive was running too hot. Only then, did the customer tell me
that, quite some time ago, a cooling fan had gone out and he had failed
to replace it. So the hard drive was fried, he needed a new cooling fan,
and had lost all his data.

Daze

 

[Guest]

This is a new HP Pavillion Tower (month old) and the fans work fine. I have
made it past the blue screen by just leaving it on, and now it's doing the
startup repair. It's saying it could take an hour to complete. Hopefully
everything is good, but still is this a heat problem? If so I'm not sure why,
the computer was off all day in an air conditioned room (I keep the temp
around 70)

 

[Guest]

You uninstalled Kapersky from the computer?
You can only run one anti-virus.

 

[Daze N. Knights]

If the laptop is new, the fans are working fine, and the outside temp is
reasonable, then you *shouldn't* have a heat problem, but that doesn't
mean that you definitely don't. Given that information, I would expect
that it is something else. It could be, for instance, that you simply
have a bad hard drive. But hopefully that is not the case and the
startup repair you're doing will put you back in business.

If you end up suspecting the possibility of a heat problem, however, you
might try running the laptop with a pencil or something propping it up
at the back to allow air circulation underneath, and you might also want
to investigate ways to check on the processor and hard drive
temperatures (for instance, via SpeedFan or some such utility).

Let us know if your startup repair doesn't get you out of bad waters. If
I can't offer any new troubleshooting ideas, hopefully someone else will
be able to.

Daze
--------------

 

[Daze N. Knights]

Good question, Mike. I would agree that two antivirus apps starting up
at the same time might cause a problem like this.