XP hangs after repair installation

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jeff Hill
  • Start date Start date
J

Jeff Hill

I did a repair installation, which experienced numerous
setup restarts. It finally completed (I think), at least
it got to "1 minute remaining" where it was deleting
temporary files, then it rebooted (there was no "setup
will now restart your system" dialog, and I don't recall
whether there should be one at that point).

During reboot, the system presents the BIOS messages,
then goes to a black screen (this is black with a signal,
not a no-signal condition), where usually the Windows XP
Home boot logo would normally fade in, but it never does.

Can anyone suggest a solution to this? There is no DOS on
the partition, and in any case the partition is NTFS, so
I can't even look for a log file.

Please Help!
Thanks
Jeff
 
Hi, Jeff.
Home boot logo would normally fade in, but it never does.
Click to expand...

How long is "never" in this case? Seconds? Minutes? Hours?

Are any hard drive lights blinking or other indications of life? I'm not
sure what you mean by
then goes to a black screen (this is black with a signal,
not a no-signal condition)
Click to expand...

a signal or no-signal condition.

Is this a name-brand (Dell? Gateway? HP???) computer, or pre-assembled
locally, or did you built it yourself? Desktop or laptop? How many hard
drives, what interface(s) (IDE, SCSI??), and how are they partitioned? In
other words, is your computer "typical" or is there something special that
we should know about it? Are you using the retail version of WinXP, or an
OEM version?

RC
 
R.C., I let it go about 20 minutes, thinking it might be
finalizing registry settings or something, There was no
disk activity.

This is a Dell flat panel display that is truly black
(and flashes a "No signal" message) when there is no
singal from the adapter. When the adapter is sending a
signal that happens to be all black the "black" is
somewhat warmer, and there's no pop-up. I suspect I was
seeing the initial black background before the logo fades
in.

The system is an elderly Asus P5A with an AMD K6 450MHz
cpu, the latest Award BIOS flash, 128M of 100MHz memory
and a 30G Maxtor 7200rpm drive with two NTFS partitions.
It's adequate for homework and web browsing, and actually
ran faster than with Win98 when I initially upgraded it
to XP.

It is behind a firewall, and has up to date NAV virus
definitions, so the worm is probably not the issue.

I'm now assuming I'll have to do a clean install,
reformatting C: in the process. If you can suggest an
alternative I'm listening.

BTW, this BIOS has a setting for "Plug'n'play OS". I
tried both Yes and No, and it didn't seem to make any
difference, though the hang occurs at a point in the boot
sequence where it probably should matter. Does XP pay
attention to that flag?

Thanks,
Jeff
 
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