XP booting problem

sakeichiban

Long time lurker, first time poster.

I have a MSI Wind netbook, all factory settings, that is refusing to boot up.

Essentially, what is happening is that I'm stuck in a ridiculously annoying loop: the system will get to the screen where you have the option of booting in safe mode, safe mode with networking, last known settings and booting XP normally. Regardless of which option I choose, the system goes to the XP boot screen. A few seconds later, a blue screen flashes - too fast for me to read or to react to - and the machine reboots to the original boot option screen. Again, a very annoying cycle.

So, forumers, I come to you on my knees, crying for help, hoping one of you will rise to the occasion and throw me a lifeline. I could simply restore the machine to factory settings, but there are some pictures and documents on my C partition that I want to be able to rescue. I had one idea: would downloading a Linux distro onto a thumb drive and booting from there help?

Anyway, looking forward to any advice you may have for me and a million thanks in advance. Free beer for the one that solves the issue!

Quantux

You can boot ubuntu from a usb stick and it should mount the C:\ part automatically. You can then copy stuff from there to the usb stick or to an SD card (assuming you have a slot) or an external HDD, or USB connected burner, or ipod, or you get the idea. Grab unetbootin from here, which will automate the download and flash image process. You can even download something like "SystemRescueCd" with unetbootin, but I've never tried it.

Alternately, you can try the factory restore, there may be an option to backup data to another part or drive before imaging (Recent HP's do this).

Or if you want to get absolutely crazy, pull the drive and hook it up to a desktop. Basically the idea is to get the drive mounted in a running system of some sort.

Mr. Buttons

try this first

article wrote:

When Windows XP encounters a fatal error, the default setting for handling such an error is to automatically reboot the system. If the error occurs while Windows XP is booting, the operating system will become stuck in a reboot cycle--rebooting over and over instead of starting up normally. In that case, you'll need to disable the option for automatically restarting on system failure.

When Windows XP begins to boot up and you see the message Please select the operating system to start or hear the single beep, press [F8] to display the Windows Advanced Options Menu. Then, select the Disable The Automatic Restart On System Failure item and press [Enter]. Now, Windows XP will hang up when it encounters the error and with any luck, it will display a stop message you can use to diagnose the problem.