XP Home not starting..

After a power outage i am unable to start XP Home.

When turning on computer everything goes fine, until XP starts to load. I get the usual XP Home loading up display with the progress bar at the bottom of the screen. Then i get a black screen with white text stating that Windows could not start and i have to select one of a few choices like start in safe mode, safe mode with prompt, safe mode with networking, start Windows normally etc.

No matter which option i select i end up back at the same page telling me Windows could not start, select one of ......

I would appreciate any thoughts you might have.

Thanks,
brt958

 

Hi PeteC, thank you for your quick response.

Yes the computer was on when the outage occurred. I did turn off the power bar before the power returned, so i am hoping the motherboard is OK.

Thank you for the links, when i finish work i will go home and try try the Disk Diagnostic Software and let i will let you know how it turns out.

Also, if i do a "Repair Install" will l lose any data on the hard drive.

Thanks , BRT

 

XP Home not starting......fixed!!!!

Hi PeteC,

I downloaded the Disk Diagnostic Software ....but i could not boot from the disk.

Somebody suggested i select F8 during booting up and then select "Disable automatic restart on system failure ". After doing this i got a description of the problem, it was "unmountable_boot_volume ".

An internet search for "unmountable_boot_volume" lead me to try the Recovery Console on my XP CD .

When i booted from my CD i selected "R" and at the command prompt i typed "chkdsk /r" and when the progress meter got to 50% the process seemed to stop. So i waited for 20 min. and it was still at 50%.......so i rebooted the computer.

This time at the command prompt i typed "fixboot" and a short time later i got this message "bootsector corrupted ". So it asked if it could create another bootsector and i answered yes.

Tried to boot computer normally.......still didn't work.......back to booting from XP CD and running the Recovery Console.

This time at the command prompt i once again entered "chkdsk /r ", this time i walked away from the computer for an hour or so and when i returned the progress meter was at 73%. Then when i returned about 15 min. later the progress meter was at 50%............

A short time later the check was finished and it said "chkdsk found one or more errors on volume....." , so it fixed the problem(s).

Once i rebooted and at last it started normally and seems to be working fine...............for now.......

So PeteC thank you very much for your time and suggestions. Brent