Hello all
Lately I had had annoying trouble with my windows XP starting up. For the past couple of months when I turn on my computer it would sometimes get stuck on the splash screen of "Windows XP loading" with blue bar. It would take a couple of restarts, but it would finally load. Unfortunately, one time it never loaded. It just stayed at that screen.
I did a system recovery and that worked for a while, but it went back to the original problem. I assumed something was amiss with my programs, so I did a full on destructive recovery on the user partition. The recovery works, but when it tells me to restart it gets stuck on the loading screen again.
I'm at wits end on this and I can't figure it out. I am going to get a new computer in about a month, but I do want to figure out what the hell is going on in case this happens again.
My computer is a HP Media center PC. It's about 4-5 years old.
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This is what happens to your computer. An horribly cluttered OS with lots of dysfunctionial malware apps all over the place.
Step 1: buy a windows XP or vista disk (any OEM will do)
Step 2: fully format your disk
Step 3: reinstall from the XP or vista disk.
Step 99: never, ever install anything that you don't *strictly* need. Windows is fragile enough as it is, you don't need to push it over the edge.
Its usually F8 or something to get the boot selection screen to come up. You should do this after the POST beep but before the Windows load screen. You should see a prompt.
When in safe mode, click start > run, then msconfig. I would initially disable all the programs listed under the startup tab. Worth a shot.
Paper, I know it's a cluttered PC. I tried very hard to get rid of that junk when I first got it, but you can't get it all I suppose. I won't bother with buying another disk since I'm gonna get a new computer anyway. I just don't want to wait another month to do stuff PC wise.
I just got back my home internet connection. This is really a kick to the nuts timing wise.
By destructive recovery you mean what exactly? A system restore? Repair install? Or did you format and reinstall? If you're still have trouble at that point it could be a hardware issue. Just last night when I swapped my PSU and video card I accidentally plugged both a IDE HDD power plug and SATA connector into my SATA HD instead of putting that second IDE plug into my DVD drive. Windows refused to boot normally or safely. Getting the power thing right straightened it out.
Also, when you restart are you booting to the CD again or trying to load Windows. I have in the past had trouble with that reset phase, but I forget how exactly I cleared it up.
I did have to replace my PSU last year around september-october. Man, if it's that simple I'm gonna scream to the heavens.
At least that gives me something to look at when I get home.
Looks like it's gonna be a trial and error weekend.
If you want to be a good troubleshooter then you pull everything out at once and keeping adding one thing, trying to boot and if it boots w/o error then you eliminate that part as bad and try the next part. It can take awhile but you'll eventually narrow it down.
The halfassed 1st method has saved me more than a couple of times. Stuff just gets dirty and loose.
PSN: Broichan
did that a long time ago.
I took the advice from above and checked over my connections. I guess I had a strip of connecters attached to too many different devices. I got it all sorted out. I type this from my home computer. Thx H/A.
I love it when a thread comes together.
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