XP Home (SP2) Freezes During Boot

[Guest]

I have had the machine (Sony VAIO) for a few years. Ran perfectly. But a few
weeks ago and again last night when I rebooted the machine (which I very
seldom do), all I got was the Windows XP screen and the blue progress bar. I
can boot into any of the safe modes OK; the event viewer doesn't show
anything weird. The first time, I just kept trying safe modes and then normal
and eventually (after a few hours), it booted up OK. Last night, I had the
same problem. So, now what to do? Last night, I finally selected system
restore and picked a recent checkpoint and everything worked (but temporal
succession doesn't imply causality, unfortunately). I'm pretty well backed up
(onto a networked W2K machine). So, what do I do? Is there any flag or
something I can set so I can see what is causing the problem? Is it waiting
for some device to respond (there are several on a USB 1.1 port)? How can I
find out what it is doing? Alternatively, should I just figure that the
machine is on its last legs and I better get something new? THANKS FOR ANY
HELP OR ADVICE!!!

RON

 

[Guest]

Try booting to xp cd,recovery,press enter for password,then type:
CHKDSK C: /R When its thru,type:EXIT Let xp restart,remove cd.
If no xp cd exist,go to run,type:cmd In cmd type:CHKDSK C: /R Agree
to restart,then type:EXIT Restart computer.

 

[Guest]

Why do you assume this is due to bad sectors? There is no message about this
when I boot up.

RON

 

[Tom]

You may not get that message, but then, have you run a "chkdsk" command, to
see if such a thing is really happening. What you are experiencing, could be
the failure of a piece of hardware (e.g. RAM module, Hard drive, etc, if
even a slight miscue with them).

Click start/run, type CHKDSK and click OK, and see what the message says. If
it comes back normel (other than anything regarding a error in the Bitmap
blah,blah), you may have problems. IN any case, as you say SR seemed to have
fixed the issue, you may have had a stuffed registry from some installed
program, that you may have uninstalled, which didn't finish out correctly.
But running CHKDSK can be reassuring.

 

[Guest]

Good points. Just ran it (with no parameters) and I got this:

Windows found errors on the disk, but will not fix them
because disk checking was run without the /F (fix) parameter.
\WINDOWS\Prefetch\CMD.EXE-087B4001.pf first allocation unit is not valid.
The e
ntry will be truncated.

When I was asked if I want to convert the lost chains to a file, I said yes,
since at least the FAT will not be screwed up. Could this be my problem?
Hard to imagine. What is CMD.EXE-087B84001.pf? I know this is a prefetch
file, but is it the same as CMD.EXE? That runs OK.

The drive is FAT32. Would I be "better" off if I converted it to NTFS?

RON

 

[Tom]

FAT is OK, if you are going to be the ONLY user of that PC, but how big is
that partition (anything over 16gigs is getting wasteful), and FATxx has no
security parameters? FATxx has its advantages, but I think NTFS is better
for faulting purposes, as it journalizes your progress as you go, and
remember it, FAT does not. FAT, OTHO, is easy to manipulate from a DOS disk,
whereas NTFS is a bit more difficult for file manipulation from there.

For now, you can run a chkdsk /f /c: to fix any errors (this will require a
reboot, simply type Y and Enter, then exit/reboot/let it fix after BIOS
POST. If you want to convert to NTFS, it is easy, but read here for
important info regarding conversions:

http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/ntfscvt.htm

(Courtesy of the late Alex Nichol MS-MVP)

 

[Guest]

Thanks for that pointer. Great article (and loss). It's more of a deal than I
thought. I'm the only user of this machine (hopefully).

 

[Tom]

Well, good luck ,and post back with any problems or what worked for you. Abd
thanks for recognizing the loss, of that which it is .

Tom