XP doesn't start booting

[sdaws06]

Hello, I have a desktop machine that has suddenly stopped booting. XP
home edition was the only OS installed (it's now at SP2). No changes
were made recently (hardware or software). However for a while now it
has been suddenly/randomly crashing (blue screen, NT fault). I think
the memory is going bad. So I think the last crash may have damaged
some important system files.

The machine turns on, the drives get checked (there are 2 hardrives and
2 CD drives), it shows a screen with some system info (IRQ mappings,
etc), and then the screen goes black and nothing happens (I waited for
20 mins one time) - no errors, no messages, no XP startup screen,
nothing. I can actually press F8 prior to that and get the boot menu
(or whatever that's called) but selecting either Last Known Good Config
or Safe Mode doesn't change the result.

I used the XP CD to try an auto-repair thing but don't have a disk for
it. I went into Repair mode but I wasn't sure what to do/check. I can
access the drive and all the directories. I did a chkdsk /r. I tried
a FixBoot. But nothing changed. A bootcfg /list worked but a bootcfg
/scan just hung. I was about to do a FixMBR but I got a message saying
the MBR was either non-standard or corrupt and that proceeding may
cause me to lose access to everything on that drive. If I went past
the Repair screen to install XP, it didn't give me a choice to repair
the partition at that point so I would have had to wipe out the
previous install to continue (which I didn't do).

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

[Guest]

Hi,

First of all. Please test all of your Memory (RAM). Go to
http://www.memtest86.com/ and download ISO image and burn to CD. After that
boot from the CD and Memtest test all of your memory.

You can check all of your hardisk with tools from maxtor, seagate, whatever.
You can download ISO Images Tools and burn it on CD. After that boot from CD
and test all of your disks.

Greets
Wolla

 

[sdaws06]

Hi, thanks for your reply. I will try to do that soon but I don't
currently have access to a machine that will allow me to burn CDs. The
memory and drive seem to be working at least well enough to try
different things in the Repair mode. But I think some of the boot
files are seriously corrupted - is there a way to tell which ones might
be and/or replace them? What's the chance that running FixMBR will
totally trash the drive?

 

[sdaws06]

Well, I couldn't do the mem or disk tests because I don't have
(another) CD burner and the desktop machine doesn't have a floppy
drive. And I didn't get any other suggestions here so I called a
friend of a friend and he gave me this link which appears to have fixed
things for the most part:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545/en-us

Originally I didn't get any errors/messages but I did get one of the
ones there after replacing the ntdetect.com and ntldr files from the XP
CD (I had to change them back after following all those steps though
since it seemed the older files caused problems with the newer lsass).

So hopefully the above link will help others.