(Long) Does any body know how to make Win XP boot?

Factual Questions
1

Hi

Ok here goes nothing:

I have a 1.5gz intel p4, 256mb ram, 32mb GeForce Mx video card, on board sound, on board network, 4 on board USB ports, ps2 mouse and keyboard, and PCI 56k modem, DVD rom, cd-rw rom, 40gb hdd and floppy.

When it was first purchaced Win XP was working just peachy fine, then the owner of the computer connected it to the net… but! heres the catch! they didn’t have a virus scanner, and uh-oh along came the Love Bug and infected nearly there entire hdd. So me, I have cleaned it, no more Love Bug! ok so fine, reboot and it should work!

But no. WinXP has given me a PFN_LIST_CORRUPT stop error. Ok off to MS Technet get the fix, all is well. Reboot. WinXP then proceeds to boot normaly, Black Lizard jumps for joy and all is good. So just to make sure things are all peachy keen I start to do normal things in WinXP and then BAM! no warning, no slow down, nothing. The computer just reboots all by its self. I figure ok pushed a wrong button it will just reboot and all is well.

This just keeps getting better,

IRQL_NOT_EQUAL_OR_LESS is the first error
BAD_SYSTEM_CONFIG_INFO is the next error
good ol’ PFN_LIST_CORRUPT
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA

So off to MS Technet and fix here and fix there… reboot and ::fingers crossed:: blank screen. No error, No BSOD, no “Loading Winxp” just nothing.

Ok reboot again, and start in safe mode. List of files scrolls down the screen, and stops at agp440.sys. Hmmm agp thats the graphics card, ok reboot again and storm out of the room. Return after long drink and Winxp has booted normaly all is well.

Ummm ya. Ok Start to browse the net and BAM! See previous description.

Now this box is under warrenty so that means I can’t open to pull cards out and play with jumpers and all that fun stuff. It was brought to me by a relation and they were hoping that I could fix it, instead of taking to the store and paying them a wad of cash.

So can anybody offer up any help? Is there something that I have done wrong?

Sorry for the long winded description.

Many Thanks in advance

Black Lizard

2

Did they give you a restore disk? - if so sounds like time to use it. If not you will be meeting (or re-meeting) some old aquaintances in te computer world -Mr. fdisk and Mrs. format C:.

3

The nightmare continues…

Thanks for the suggestion k2dave it has confirmed many things about the computer.

  1. It used to work
  2. At least DOS works
  3. WinXP is a very bad thing
  4. Maybe Black Lizard should let the ppl at the store look after it

Well I inserted the recovery disk (with fingers and toes crossed), so far so good things are looking spiffy and good then blip the computer restarts and I was filling in the Product Key, so ok I’ll give it one more try… and yep you guessed it blip it decied to restart again.

So off to the good (yet scary) house of Mr. Fdisk and Mrs. Format C: - did that with out error!

Ok so here we go again… insert the CD and start the install, I was able to reinstall it successfuly after about 10 tries. And so once again Black Lizard starts to do something in WinXP (mine sweeper) and BAM! out it blinks again and it’s the OP all over again.

Grrrr…

toodles off to go mess with computer…

Black Lizard

4

Couple of guesses…

  1. Your graphics card driver is screwed up. I don’t know exactly why. I HOPE the stupid virus would know better than to try and infect a .sys file - it should know it’s not smart enough to pull that off. But maybe it tried anyway. A corrupt video driver could easily cause the random crashings.

  2. Your Windoze config is all putzed. This could easily be true as well. Unfortunately fixing it all will probably take you ten times as long as just reinstalling.

  3. This is very unlikely, but who knows… you may have actual filesystem corruption of some sort. Have you run chkdsk.exe (or whatever the XP equivalent is)?
    -Ben

5

Try to install fresh drivers for your video card.

6

Win XP is not a very bad thing, viruses are a very bad thing. It sounds like the virus screwed up multiple system files. What you should probably do is format, reinstall the OS, and install all your programs. If you can, get any important files off the drive before formatting. A complete reinstall is a pain in the butt, but it should get your machine back running flawlessly, and it only takes a day. As I’m sure you’ve realized, always run an up to date virus scanner…we lost two machines in 2 days earlier this year at work, and it was a pain in the butt…

Jman

7

WinXP has given me a lot of problems on multiple computers… maybe you should try a format and reinstall with Win98 or ME and see if that works fine, then install XP, so you can figure out whether the problem is with the OS or the hardware. If you see the problem only with XP, there is a high chance that a misconfigured or incorrect driver is causing the problem… a tool called Emergency Recovery Utility ( ERU ) has been extremely useful in helping me recover from most crashes in XP ( when even System Recovery in Safe Mode couldn’t help ).

8

Jman I think I might just have to reinstall, but I think I’ll do what xash suggested first, that is put Win98 back on and get the system to work then put WinXP back on.
xash Emergency Recovery Utility? hmm I haven’t heard of that one before. Where might I be able to find it?
Thank you all very much for the responces, they have re-affirmed many of the douts that I have had about WinXP and have been very useful.

Black Lizard

9

It’s also possible there is more than one virus? Doesn’t XP have a ‘restore’ function? Then you can restore a previous working OS environment, I know ME has it so Xp must have it.

10

If only it were a perfect world handy, if only…

Taking your suggestion, Black Lizard proceeded to try to “Boot To Previous Operating System” and it goes, and it goes and then good ol’ Invalid System Disk Error Please Insert Disk And Try Again appears. Quickly followed by a scream of anguish.

So after Black Lizard finishes his Blueberry Tea (yum!) he will say forget it with WinXP and will Fdisk and Format C: and put Win98 back on and then re-install WinXP and hope and pray that all will work out:)

Wish me luck!

Black Lizard

11

Black Lizard, you completely fdisked and formatted your drive. There would be no remnants of any viruses after that, so this is not the problem.

If you’ve got a fresh and clean install of Windows XP, I would suspect a hardware issue. I’ve had things like this happen when my power supply started to go bad. Maybe you could pick up a new power supply (they’re not too expensive) and swap it in. This should be only a minor operation.

If that doesn’t solve the problem, just put the old one back in and return the new one.

12

Black Lizard, ERU is available from download.com :

http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10106-100-7999997.html?tag=st.dl.10001-103-1.lst-7-1.7999997

either go to the link or do a search for “Emergency Recovery Utility” on download.com

it is extremely easy to use and is only 578k in size. You’ll be amazed how many times it will save you from a crash in XP. It also works in DOS. So even when XP totally screws up, and doesn’t allow you to boot to limited DOS using their stupid Advance Recovery option in the boot menu, you can still create a DOS boot disk, load it with a program called NTFS DOS ( available from http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/NTFSDOS.shtml or http://www.listsoft.com/program.php?id=307 ) and access your NTFS partition from DOS ( assuming you chose NTFS over FAT32 for the XP install ) and use ERU to restore all system files to a previous no-conflicts state.

also, Jpeg Jones’ power supply problem reminded me that when i was researching my problems with XP installs, i seem to recall that Windows NT/XP will find hardware errors that 98 did not care about, since NT/XP is a lot more sensitive to errors in hardware, especially with respect to memory and the difference in speeds/access rates between individual SIMM modules.

This article from Microsoft’s Knowledge Base explains…

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q101272

“…The symptoms are a system which runs Windows when first turned on; however, after 15 minutes or so, the system starts having memory errors…”

So it is possible that, while your hardware is working perfectly fine under Windows 98/ME, the same hardware starts causing errors with NT/XP.

Also, since you mention that your comp. automatically reboots when it encounters an error, there is an option somewhere that is set by default in XP to reboot on error. This can be unchecked, and probably should.

It you uncheck it, you should get a blue screen with an error message instead, that will help you debug it.

Control Panel/System/Advanced/Start-up recovery
Remove the tick in “Automatically Restart”

here’s a thread on another forum that discusses your problem :

http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/13997.html

also : http://windows.about.com/library/weekly/aa030599.htm

that should keep you busy for the moment…

13

xash you are a life-saver. After giving up for the night, that is, after Fdisk, Format, re-install and recieving the same errors all over again. I have used the ERU all of my problems have been solved! :slight_smile: It boots, it stays booted, and no more errors!

Thanky you all so very much; saved me from being boiled alive!
Black Lizard

14

Well, if it worked, then thats great!

When I fdisk & reinstall I have to reset stuff in the bios by turning off any bios virus scanners or other bios protections so it can write a new bios boot sector. That works for me.

15

It’s a good idea to save the ERU backups on a drive letter other than C:, so that even if C: messes up real bad you can restore it from D: using DOS.

Note that if you have an NTFS partition on C: and don’t have another comp. with an OS that can access NTFS files handy, you would have to boot to DOS using a DOS boot disk and additionally load NTFSDOS from the autoexec.bat file to be able to access and repair the messed up C:.

The only problem with NTFSDOS is that it will mount your NTFS C: drive as F: or whatever free drive letter is available, but not C:.

So let’s assume you booted thru a DOS boot disk and mounted the NTFS C: drive as F: and tried running the ERU recovery option, ERU would try and write to C: which now does not exist, since C: has become F:. In this case, all you need to do is use Edit and replace all calls to C:\ by F:\ in the text editable ERU recovery files directory.

I’m glad the info was of help to you…the SDMB has saved my life innumerable times :slight_smile:

16

Have you checked your CPU and Video fans? Sounds like an overheating problem to me.

17

Well it all seems to be working now…

bdgr I’d love to be able to do that, but there is one slight problem, heh, the box is still under warrenty for parts. So that means that if the little warrenty sticker attached to the back of the computer is broken then the warrenty is void and Black Lizard is in even more trouble!

Thank you all again, (I don’t mean to sound gushy but you really saved my bacon!)

Black Lizard