XP locking up?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Cnetra
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Cnetra

Hello. I have a XP PC that I'm having some difficulties with. This might be
a hardware issue but I'm not sure. I cannot successfully restart XP. It
dies during startup. The box seems to run great, just don't turn it off. I
did some reading and thought it might be a corrupted MBR. I loaded recovery
console and proceeded with a fixmbr. The response listed was the mbr was
corrupted and a new mbr was loaded successful. Great, I thought. Well not
really. XP will not start or restart unless, and I seem to have a pattern
now, the PC sits for say 5 minutes with the power off. Could this be a boot
virus or do I have a hardware issue? I'm lost. Any help from the experts
is greatly appreciated.

Tom
 
Processor maybe over heating. Check all the fans and clean if dusty. Maybe power supply also.
 
Cnetra said:
Hello. I have a XP PC that I'm having some difficulties with. This might be
a hardware issue but I'm not sure. I cannot successfully restart XP. It
dies during startup. The box seems to run great, just don't turn it off. I
did some reading and thought it might be a corrupted MBR. I loaded recovery
console and proceeded with a fixmbr. The response listed was the mbr was
corrupted and a new mbr was loaded successful. Great, I thought. Well not
really. XP will not start or restart unless, and I seem to have a pattern
now, the PC sits for say 5 minutes with the power off. Could this be a boot
virus or do I have a hardware issue? I'm lost. Any help from the experts
is greatly appreciated.

Tom
Click to expand...

While powered down, unplug ALL of your USB devices. It might not be, but
could be the reason for a very lengthy boot delay (around 5 minutes) and it
can be associated with a corrupted external USB HDD. The rest of what I say
here assumes a bad USB HDD device. This might be evident by several long
delays during the boot process, after which all works ok until you try to
access a bad USB HDD (say, with Explorer) at which time you must suffer yet
more long delays. This can be caused, and often is, by disconnecting the USB
HDD cable while the computer is turned on. If you have a bad USB HDD then
suffer all the delays and then click Start/Run and type "cmd" (without the
quote marks). Note the drive letter of the USB HDD. In that dosbox type:
chkdsk x: /F
(where x is the drive letter, and don't forget the colon character). Maybe
chkdsk can recover some of the corrupted files and make the HDD readable
again, which will cure the bootup delay problem. If the HDD is NTFS
formatted then do the same command again but replace "/F" with "/R". This
all takes considerable time.

You should not use a large (say, 80gigs) FAT32 formatted USB HDD with a
computer that it was not formatted with. Without special help, FAT32 on a
computer booted from NT, 2000, or XP can not understand that big of a
volume, so move any data off of it that you need and reformat it as NTFS.
Note that Ghost 2003 understands NTFS formatted HDD's.
 
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