Boot up freezes

Helping a friend with Windows XP Home Edition. Recently, for no apparant reason, bootup freezes at a screen displaying the message
F1 to continue
F2 setup utility

F1 does continue the bootup through to the desktop, but can't understand why this is happening and how to resolve it.

Tried System Restore, but made no difference.

Any suggestions?

 

Hello Eleanor,

Does it happen booting up in safe mode - F8 or F5? If not, I would look at recent software installs creating conflicts.

Another possibilty is corrupt/missing Windows componts. To address that:

Start > Run > cmd sfc /scannow and have your XP install disc handy. There is a space between sfc and /

sfc - system file checker, retrieves the correct version of the file from %Systemroot%\System32\Dllcache or the Windows installation source files, and then replaces the incorrect file.

If you want to see what was replaced, right click My Computer > manage, expand event viewer > system.

Regards - Charles

 

Hi Eleanor316...

I'm assuming that this message shows up as soon as your friend turns on the computer during the BIOS check...right after the RAM Check and Hard Drive check.

Was your message something like this...

Invalid System Configuration Data
Press <F1> to resume, <F2> to Setup

This sounds like they have a Phoenix BIOS. On many of the older PC's running Phoenix BIOS at my work will get this msg from time to time. The fix was to...

1) Go into Setup by pressing "F2 "
2) Select "Advanced Menu "
3) Find field called "Reset configuration data"
4) Change default setting "No" to "Yes"
5) Save and exit the Setup program

There is a site that I found that has a little more info on the possible cause of this error, bottom of the page...http://www.5starsupport.com/faq/bios.htm

 

Thanks for the help. I'll try those methods. Thanks especially for the great web site you gave me.

 

Please post back your results when you can...this will let us and anybody else who reads this post know how or if it was resloved.

 

Yes, I 'll do that later in the week.

 

Nope, that didn't work. I've given up on it and passed it on to someone else.

 

Sorry that didn't help.

If you find out what happened can you post back the results.

Thanks,

 

I'll do that.