My computer won't start

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

Please help. It's an XP machine.

Every time i try to start, it shoots me over to the screen where I can shoose safe mode, etc.

I tried system restore, I tried choosing last known configuration that worked.

Any other ideas?

Thanks

 

[STR]

It's been a long time since I've used XP, but I think if you pop the install CD in you get an option to repair windows. This will replace the affected system files with copies from the disc, without erasing any of your data. I know it's on there for Vista/W7. This feature has saved my bacon on a couple of occasions.

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

Thanks. I'll see if I have a CD like that

 

[MadMan1701A]

Running CHKDSK from the xp recovery console might help. Whenever I have a machine doing that, I'll run chkdsk, then do a system restore.

Of course, it's possible that your RAM is bad. Use this:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

when you boot up with it, go under mainboard tools, and run Memtest86+. If your RAM is bad, it will make alot of noise.

Hope some of that helped...

 

[Trekker4747]

Is there gas in it?



I agree with the above poster who said to try a repair install.

 

[Deks]

Do try a repair install as people have already suggested.
However, if that doesn't work, and you have data on the C partition (where the OS is) that you want to backup, you can try the following:
Download and burn Ubuntu LiveCD.
Boot the Linux OS off the CD directly (no installation).
Once inside the OS, your hard drive should appear on the desktop.
You can then copy your desired files onto a usb stick for example.

After that, simply re-install the XP OS (preferably with SP2 and SP3 slipstreamed on it to avoid lengthy update downloads) on your machine and that's it.

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

thanks i do have ubunto

 

[Capt. Vulcan]

This is probably a stupid suggestion, but try disconnecting almost all of your usb stuff and extra harddrives. I once spent an hour trying to figure out why my system wasn't starting. In the end it turned out some new storage manager software I installed had changed the boot order of the harddrives. The system wasn't starting because it was trying to boot from an old drive that I had stripped most of the os from. I also had a problem where the system wouldn't boot if I had a thumb drive or ipod shuffle attached to the system.

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

that's happened to me before. I had an old mp3 playetr that was causing my computer to not get past the halfway meter when starting.

TYhanks for reminding me of that. It was not a dumb suggestion.