Hangs at Splash.. Help?

Hi, new guy here..

Anyways, Yesterday night my pc was running fine. I shut it down and today it boots up, when it hits the Windows XP Home splash screen before logon screen, it reboots. This sounds similar to another user's problems in this thread

http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=29805

Well, I've also tried getting into windows anyways I could, and no avail.. Safe mode will also reboot at splash.. I have only gotten the pc to boot up with knoppix live on cd linux to surf the web and try to figure out what is going on.. All the files are accessible and I have a few gigs of free space so that shouldn't be the problem.. I then tried to use the recovery console to chkdsk, and I forgot the admin password so I just used offline nt password and registry editor bootdisk which I found while still in linux,

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/bootdisk.html

I thought I'd just put that link there in case someone could use it.. It helped alot.. I was able to pass through my admin account finally, and used recovery console, chkdsk'd both drives, nothing looked wrong.. exited then used winxp cd recovery option, It started to replace all of the files and appeared to be going good, and then it needed to reboot to finish loading more files, alright, now here's the frustrating part. It reboots, and shows the setup screen for continuing, cd drive kicks in starts, then BAM it reboots the computer... Yes, I believe it will keep rebooting forever if I leave the pc on.. I'm not sure if it is the "blaster worm/virus" but I don't know how to get rid of it if I cannot boot windows..

Sorry for the long long post but I thought a detailed one would help.. Any Ideas? If possible I need help asap maybe a reply by e-mail or aim [vas k telefonu] without brackets...

Thanks!..

 

You may be stuck and have to reinstall. Hard to say at this point. With the freeze at the splash screen, it sounds more like a hardware issue than a virus though. Blaster and it's relatives will usually let the system start and run for a few seconds before crashing it.

Things I'd try now:

- power down and remove all the hardware you can and still run. Basically, leave the video board and drives.
- start up and go into your BIOS settings and revert them to the default.
- try to boot into safe mode.

If that works you can begin figuring out what went wrong. If it doesn't, I'd try a different video board and see what happens.

 

Oh man... alright.. I'll give this a shot. Thanks for the input. I'll post again when I can..

 

Whoever designed the auto-restart feature in XP, and then had it enabled by default, ought to be clobbered by a printed out version of the MSKB! (Bet that would make the NYC phone book look small!) I haven't run into one single computer where that feature was USEFUL!!!!

You could try clearing CMOS (reverting BIOS settings to default, like Newt suggested) If you can boot it ONE TIME after that, it would let you shut off the auto restart, whether you're in safe or regular mode. Then at least you would know what the errors are!

If you got into BIOS and changed boot order to cd first, unless you have a hardware problem, you should be able to use your XP CD for a repair. You said you did that and it reboots- XP reboots a couple of times during install. Are you saying it rebooted at inappropriate times? Kept on rebooting w/o stopping? Did you just let it go and see what it would do on it's own?

Blaster is not your problem. You've either got a MS update side effect or a hardware issue. If you don't want to lose your data, and you may already have, if you have done a partial install, you could pull your hard drive, and get the info off by putting it in a working system. But you probably know that.

The following is not going to help you, Jutin, and you prob know it all, too, but for anyone reading this thread:

Turn off auto restart
Control Panel/System/Advanced/Startup and recovery
uncheck auto restart

After an XP install, I turn Auto Restart off before I install ANY software or do ANY tweaking. It gets shut off BEFORE Internet Security is installed, or the comp ever goes online. I also always set BIOS to look for a floppy or cd before the harddrive at boot. Yes, it takes 3 seconds longer to boot the comp, but that is worth it, compared to the inconvenience and frustration of an unresponsive BIOS when you need it.

Jutin, post back and let us know what's working, and what's not. Best of luck!
Johanna

 

hey!

Finally my system is up and running again!.. Sadly I did have to format. First thing I did do right after the fresh install, is uncheck that auto reboot option (which I also don't understand how that would help, at times where it should auto reboot, i.e. freezing, it doesn't and I end up manually turning it off) then on with all the updates and customizing..

I did try to clear the CMOS, the first time before I even posted my question here, and again just to do it.. I had already set my BIOS to floppy then cd then hdd, thankfully since it didn't like to respond to keystrokes after the cd boot. Oh and to clear that up about the windows repair. The repair option worked only until the second phase of it, where the system had to be restarted. When it loaded up the repair screen again, it would initialize, display that it was about to start adding files, then it would reboot. Which could go on forever I believe.

Other than that, I used knoppix linux live on cd as an os to recover my data, which to my bad luck, the burning program k3b which is included with it was bad. I visited their site, and it said the version I had was a bad one and needed to be patched, because it fails cds almost 100% of the time.. Since it was running on cd, there wasn't any way or easy way for that matter to upgrade the writing software, I just took a chance and tried to back up my data.
Results were, 10 fancy cd coasters, and 3 funtional data cd's. Which aren't that functional since they only completed about 97 to 99 percent on all of them. I tried to compensate the files and make it work out.

So that's about it.. yup.

Thanks for the help and suggestions Johanna and Newt!

 

Jutin-
Look in the General Discussions sections for "How to run a Carefree computer" thread. You have a fresh install, now, before you get it too filled up, consider partitioning it. If you keep your data on a second partition, recovery isn't so painful- or hopeless. Sorry about your coasters! (Don't you just hate that?) Thanks for posting back and letting us know how you solved your problem.

Johanna

 

No problem,
Everything is fine now, don't worry I've partition is always one of the first things I do. yup