Xp Stalling At Start Up

I am running XP Professional service pack 1. During start up the computer gets to the black background with the Microsoft Windows XP Professional Logo.... with the blue bars running across the bottom of the screen... then the blue bars stop and the computer goes no further.... start up just stops...the blue bars stop and the screen remains frozen.

Any suggestions as to what is happening would be appreciated.

Thank you.

 

Can you boot with LKGC, or safe mode? If you can get it to boot, do directly to Device Mgr (Control Panel> System> Hardware tab) I suspect a driver is hanging. Have you made any recent hardware changes? If Device Mgr looks good, try System Restore to a point before the problem. If none of this works, post back.

Johanna
ps did you have auto update enabled?

 

Hi toycept...

I had this same problem about 2 years ago after running a "CHKDSK /F " on my C: Drive. After the check ran it the PC rebooted and stalled right at the same spot as you. After trying a couple reboots I ended up running "System Restore" to a earlier point and was able to boot successfully into Windows.

I figured this was a wake call and as it had been 6 months since my last install I saved all my files needed and re-loaded.

 

Johanna and Kent.... thanks for the replies.

I'm not sure what I did but the problem has gone away.

This all started when I ran Norton Systems' Speed Disk. In the middle of running Speed Disc I came back to the computer to find it at the frozen start up screen. From that point I couldn't restart without it hanging up. I had to unplug the computer to get it to where I could at least start it up in safe mode..... I don't know what I did.... but it is working OK now. I was able to run Disk Doctor and it fixed some items... I ran Speed Disc (staying by the computer until it ran the program and finished)....So for now at least all is good.

Thanks again. One good thing is that in the past, the drawer on my CD player wouldn't open all the way when the open button was pushed... now the CD drawer opens normal, like it should. Maybe there was a problem there.

 

Do not use Norton Speed Disk on XP. The native defrag app in XP (a really lite version of diskkeeper lite) sees a Norton defragged disk as being badly fragmented since they have very different ideas about optimization and immediately starts some background re-arranging. The two apps will always fight each other and you can't easily stop the background work XP is doing.