XP Pro won't boot past desktop ...

[RS]

I went out of town and had left my computers running, connected to
internet, behind a NAT router. No one else was here, so am sure nothing was
done physically at this end, so to speak. When I got home, on one of them I
found the monitor 'black' and that did not change with mouse movement or
space key, etc.

Reset was applied and even power-off-pause-on. The following seem to happen:

a) sometimes appears to be booting, but hangs forever with hourglass when a
user account is clicked on. (even in Safe Mode)

b) sometimes get the black screen on reset, with no further progress.

c) but usually it get's to the desktop before it hangs.... it locks up with
mouse and keyboard inopperative.

Keyboard, mouse and monitor are all firmly plugged in / attached.

Sometimes MS Messenger, ICQ and Yahoo messenger will almost finish loading
.... then it hangs, sometimes with hourglass cursor, sometimes with pointer
cursor. Thought I would let the system start with the XP Pro setup CD and
see what happens. I booted off the CD and it said the usual about checking
my system or whatever ... Then something called TrendAway Virus checker cut
in and said that I had a boot sector virus. It suggested putting in a clean
bootable floppy disk and pressing <R> to reboot.

I made such a disk on another machine, inserted it and pressed R. There was
an error message, saying to instert another disk and press any key. I
wondered if the virus the TrendAway thing had found, had in fact infected
the floppy. I made the boot disk again and this time write-protected the
floppy (hmmm.... wonder if there's a chance that whatever is on my faulty
machine could travel to my good machine via that act of re-formatting the
floppy !!?)

This time, the faulty machine booted successfully via the bootable floppy. I
got an "A" prompt, but no further instructions from TendAway ... leaving me
wondering what to do next. I tried changing to drive C, etc., but all such
attempts give "Invalid drive specification".

Did try booting from a Norton 2003 AntiVirus CD. It ran for a few seconds
and then said it didn't find anything in the boot sector. I just remembered
that I don't have Norton on that machine ... rather I have AntiVir. Is it
possible that the Norton Disk is meant to work with an existing installation
of Norton? That would explain why it ran so briefly.

Could a flaky PS have caused some corruption? Or would it be stopping the
bootup process? The latter seems less likely somehow. I say that because the
bootup proceeds quite far.

I have tried to get into Safe Mode, but the hanging is the same, or perhaps
it hangs at the choosing the user stage. I have tried Safe Mode with
Command Prompt ... this also hangs.

Any insights are appreciated !

Thanks,

-RS-

 

[Interossiter]

I went out of town and had left my computers running, connected to
internet, behind a NAT router. No one else was here, so am sure nothing was
done physically at this end, so to speak. When I got home, on one of them I
found the monitor 'black' and that did not change with mouse movement or
space key, etc.

1) Doing that is stupid.

2) You may have gotten zapped up the power or telephone line.

3) If 2 is wrong, your XP may have become corrupted for whatever reason.
Boot off XP CD, go to first Repair you see and do a FIXMBR and then reboot.
If that doesn't help, boot off XP CD again and go to SECOND repair option
you see and then choose that. In that area you will be able to load windows
ON TOP OF windows without losing anything that isn't already lost.

4) Lastly, your disk may be unable to be salvaged. You may have to bite the
bullet and reinstall XP from scratch. This possibility is why it is always
good to have image backups. You could be back to working in 40 mins with a
proper image backup, all settings and such back again.

 

[Billy]

Just for the heck of it, double check the cables, firmly seated.
May even want to verify that an 80 wire cable is used (if required) and
connected properly.