Win Xp died - Any Ideas?
 

Homebuild approx 5 months old. Been fine since day 1. Win Xp Sp2.

Shut down fine last night, nothing installed or changed - come home from work and it gets passed windows loading screen does the click where the screen resolution changes on the monitor then says "windows starting" with blue background as normal. After 5 secs just dies and reboots. Does this continually in a big loop until I shut it off.

Have tried:

-Safe mode - same thing happens
-Load last working config - same thing
-Enable vga mode - same
-Debugging mode - same + no info given
-Logging mode - same + no info given

-Also boot using win xp cd and select repair. Ran a chkdsk and no problems found on c:

Anyone got any ideas before I copy anything useful off the HDD then reformat and reinstall windows?

Cheers,
Simon

P.S. On spare PC now.

I wonder if your graphics card or memory have died? Open your box and re-seat your cards and slots.

Other than that it could be your mobo or your HD's :(

GFX seems fine - after all it works well enough to display everything up until it crashes. No memory faults - BIOS recognises both slots.

Have disconnected everything that isnt needed (DVD, 2nd hard drive, all usb connections etc).

Simon.

As it's also happening in safe there is a major problem I guess. My husband (who builds pc's for a living) said 'reinstall' :)

Before you re-install, try a recovery. Start the re-install procedure, but don't wipe the disk first. Ignore the option for recovery that you get when you first start (the one that says "using the recovery console". Instead choose the "Install" option. At some point Windows will tell you that it has detected an existing version of Windows, and did you want to repair it? Yes, you do. It will then re-install all the system files, but leave everything else intact. If it succeeds, you'll need to reload any updates, SPs etc.


M

Nearly forgot: that trick will only work if you have a proper XP disk. If you've got one of those stupid "recovery disks" provided by the major computer companies, kick yourself several times, then make sure you've learnt this lesson.


M