XP freezes on boot

I'm posting this here, but I'm not convinced it's an XP problem. My brother-in-law brought his PC to me to have a look at for him. When powered on, it starts to load XP and gets as far as the XP splash screen with the little progress indicator box and just stops, no hard drive activity, no progress bar, nothing. The strange thing is, the display is even very, very faint. I tried to boot into safe mode, same results. (It's XP/SP2)

Here's what I've tried so far;

Booted to recovery console and ran chkdsk /r, it found some problems and repaired them. Tried to reboot to normal mode and safe mode, same problem. From recovery console the file structure appears to be fine, I can access files, copy them, etc.

Replaced video card, same problem.

Replaced ram, same problem, different cpu same problem.

Tried a repair install of XP, all was going fine until it rebooted then same problem.

Ran Western Digital's extended diagnostics on the hard drive and it came out clean.

I've never seen this type problem before, and short of formatting and reinstalling XP I'm not sure what else to check. I'm not even sure that a format and reinstall won't produce the same problem. I'm thinking some kind of Motherboard failure, but not sure what on the board could be bad. It's a Shuttle AK-12 MB with an Athlon 700 cpu.

Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

Don't know what that means. Is another monitor also faint? Don't see a connection with the booting failure. Might look at the BIOS to see voltages and clock speed.

If you haven't already, might try fixboot in the recovery console. Can use fixboot /? for help. Have you checked the boot.ini file also?

You could try to save any important data to a spare HDD by doing a parallel install Install Windows XP to a new folder, which would also let you look at the drive more thoroughly, and see what the display looks like. You could also place the HDD in another box as slave to check it and save any data.

Or you could Ghost it to the good drive, a good backup procedure IMO. Acronis is also good for making an image.

Sounds like you're headed for a clean install, removing the partition and remaking it to clean the system areas; format won't do all that. Can't think of anything else to try.

Wait for another opinion if you like, but sounds to me like windows may be beyond repair and needs reinstalling.

 

Hi Sparrow,

Thanks for the reply. The display is very hard to see and I know that it's not the monitor. I thought it might be the video card but turned out not to be that either. I'll try the fixboot tonight and check the boot.ini file. I will probably end up hooking the drive to one of my machines to copy off any folders that need to be saved and start over from scratch. I'm just not sure if that's going to be any better than the repair install that I tried.

 

Hi Bill,

the display is even very, very faint.
That certainly catches one's eye. How is the Monitor and the system connected to the electical outlet? I assume you have a surge protector, how is that working?

Regards - Charles

 

Hi Charles,

Yep, they are both on a surge protector. If I hook up another system to this monitor everythings fine, so it's got to be his machine. I suspect the mainboard but not sure what on it would be bad.

 

At first I would have thought it was a graphics drivers-SP2 problem. Especially if it looked OK before restart during repair reinstall. I wonder about the load on the power supply now. Check the power requirements against the rating of the power supply here:
http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/

It may be when the "features" of the graphics card are being utilized, although that would not explain how it runs in Safe Mode.

I would check for and update the motherboard/chipset drivers, then, update the graphics drivers. It may cause some termoil, so be ready for a reformat if it goes wrong.

If you need to reformat, I would install XP, go to SP2, then install the latest motherboard/chipset drivers, then the latest (or recommended) graphics drivers.

Matt

 

pull everything out of the computer except harddrive and video card move memory around make sure everything is seated if you have a video setting in bios {disable or enable} and or remove video card if you have an old pci video card try that {this is not for the faint of heart} you might have to move memory back to original positions and clear bios or just set the jumper on the mother board to clear bios