I can’t get my previously working Windows XP Pro system to boot, not even in Safe Mode (the boot options window comes up offering to boot in Safe Mode, but all it does is fail and try to reboot again).
I can boot into Repair mode using the system CD, and I’ve done a CHKDSK /R on the boot disk, but the problem remains unchanged.
My guess is that the Registry is messed up, but there’s nothing I can do about it since I can’t even boot to Safe Mode.
Any advice, please?
There should be an option to log the boot sequence. If you could do that then let us know what the log says it would be helpful.
Otherwise…maybe boot to recovery mode, backup all sensitive data, and then reinstall Windows.
You tried selecting the ‘repair’ option and it still doesn’t work? I had a similar problem last weekend and reinstalling windows fixed it.
Thanks for your reply!
I’ll be happy to oblige your request. But do you know how to get the log? The boot options page that comes up because of the boot failure does not provide that option. Is there another way to get the log?
The most important thing not to lose is the partition table (there are 3 partitions on the system hard disk). Any idea how to save this table? Or do you think it would be safe from loss?
Thanks for answering. The “repair” option simply enters a DOS-like mode where you can issue a variety of commands;l it doesn’t fix anything automatically. There IS the “ASR” option, (for Automatic System Recovery), but I don’t think I have the necessary disks to make that work.
However, if I re-install Windows (which I agree might be my only option), I will lose a great deal of information. This will be my absolute last resort.
XP has also Automatic Repair which is a tricky thing to get to, but doesn’t require any extra disks, system recovery points, etc. as far as I know.
Start windows installation as normal, and then at some point it will prompt you whether you want to reinstall on top of the selected installation or try to repair.
I am not a computer techie, but I had a similar problem a few months ago. Computer would turn on, go through the usual BIOS screen, then hang and reboot itself endlessly. Finally, it did tell me that Windows could not be started because of a missing or corrupt DLL (dynamic link library, IIRC) file.
So, after googling the DLL in particular, I finally came upon a site that dealt with repairing the problem manually. I had to find the WinXP install/recovery CD and boot into DOS. After that, there were a series of commands I had to type in order to tell the computer to locate, unpack, and install the DLL I needed from the CD. I think there were about 6 or 7 commands. Turns out that after I did it for that DLL, the next attempt to boot reported ANOTHER bad DLL file, and I had to go through the process several more times.
Ultimately, after unpacking and replacing several of them, Windows started and everything was back to normal. I immediately bought “WinTasks” and a firewall, as well as using Spyware/Malware stuff each week. Also got rid of Internet Explorer in favor of Mozilla. Since then I’ve not had the problem again.
I realize this isn’t a heck of a lot of help, but maybe it’ll count for something. Good luck!
Not the answer you want to have to resort to, but this is what I had to do when my wife’s laptop got totally effed up and Windows couldn’t find the registry (and Toshiba tech support kindly told me how to reimage the machine):
I grabbed my handy-dandy Knoppix CD (a “live CD” version of Linux) and slapped that in the CD drive and restarted the machine. This allowed me to boot up under a totally clean version of Linux right off of the CD.
Knoppix mounts your local hard drives in read-only mode, even if they are NTFS, and they show up on the desktop.
I then plugged in a thumb drive (immediately recognized by Knoppix) and proceeded to copy all of her most important files to the thumb drive.
I was kind of pissed at the lameness of Toshiba support, but that was nicely balanced by the geek rush I felt from having used Linux to save the day 
.
I’m sure that this could have all been done with a Linux-on-a-floppy distribution or even using some fancy Windows floppy, but I was really happy to have the full-featured desktop manager running so that I could do everything with the mouse.
You can boot to the XP disc and go through the steps of a re-install and during the process you will be prompted to either install over the current installation or Repair the current installation. You want to select that to see if it will fix the problem.
minor7flat5, thank you so much for your sage advice! I dl’d knoppix, burned it, and booted my XP system with it no sweat. The Knoppix page even stated explicitly that it is ideal as a rescue system!
Now, here’s what you wrote:
[QUOTE=minor7flat5]
Not the answer you want to have to resort to, but this is what I had to do when my wife’s laptop got totally effed up and Windows couldn’t find the registry (and Toshiba tech support kindly told me how to reimage the machine):
I grabbed my handy-dandy Knoppix CD (a “live CD” version of Linux) and slapped that in the CD drive and restarted the machine. This allowed me to boot up under a totally clean version of Linux right off of the CD.
Knoppix mounts your local hard drives in read-only mode, even if they are NTFS, and they show up on the desktop.
I then plugged in a thumb drive (immediately recognized by Knoppix) and proceeded to copy all of her most important files to the thumb drive.
[QUOTE]
That’s just what I plan to do, but since you’ve done it already, I’d like to ask a question: Can you tell me how to format the thumb drive for NTFS so it can be read back into Windows when I’m ready?
Thanks again!
It could be that the master boot record is messed up - I had this on a PC here at work recently; booting into the recovery console allowed me to run a disk check, but repairing the disk errors didn’t make the system bootable - repairing the master boot record (FIXMBR from the recovery console) sorted everything out.
Usually, this doesn’t affect the content of the drive and it will normally just allow you to boot back into Windows (assuming the master boot record was the actual problem, of course) without losing any of your data or settings, but there’s always a small possibility that it will make things worse. Usually it’s an acceptable risk though, considering the severity of the exisiting problem.
I don’t know how to do this from Linux (though I’m sure it can be done). I would simply pop it into another Windows machine and format it there; IIRC, you can only format it as FAT32, and not NTFS, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I will warn you that there is a bit of a trick to being able to write to the device in Knoppix: it is initially mounted as read-only. You need to go to its properties, select “writable”, then unmount and remount the device to allow writing. This took a little work to figure out since it is a two-step process. Good luck!
After I re-imaged my wife’s machine (the only option Toshiba offered 
), and spent a couple of hours reinstalling everything and uninstalling all of the spammy trial software, I used Ghost to make an image of the hard drive onto a network drive. At least the next time this happens, I shouldn’t have to go back to the very beginning.