booting prob...

[Acoustic5679]

My buddy has this CPu that will boot up to the point where the XP loading screen is and then just reboot again. It will continue this cycle nonstop. He has a Raid mirror setup and I have tried to load safe mode up with no success. I looked in his Bios and no hard disks can be found. Aside from those proablems his monitor will not regonize the video card all the time and radmonly it takes a feew reboots for it to get the screen showing. I am assuming this is a hardware issue. I was going to try and switch his sata cables around, but his system only has two for some wierd reason. I am thinking of Dbaning(prog that wipes everything from the HD) his system and start fresh to see if that fixes the prob. Any other suggestions before I have him do this?

 

[SYL\X/3K]

pull out his HD and plug into a different PC run an good Anti-Virus program clean out the trojans, and the rest of the crap thats on it

should work my cousin had same problem

 

[junglemike]

If it is hardware-related problem, unplug/remove everything except mobo/cpu/ram/video and try to boot. Than plug devices one by one untill you find a problem.

In case this is software problem, i.e winxp is damaged to the point it cannot start in safe mode, than you need to:
1) In case you have precious data on boot partition, just put WINXP bootable cd, refuse to rapair existing xp install when prompted, create new partition (or use any existing one except for old winxp partition) and let winxp istall there
2) same as 1) only completely remove all partitions, or re-format existing winxp partition and put new winxp there.

 

[Kidwell28]

the best way to repair your windows is to skip the first prompt to repair...this takes you to the dos console...and when it says it's detecting other versions of windows it'll give you the option to repair again...do it now... this will protect all of your data as it only deletes and reinstalls all of the windows files... nothing else is touched... you might give that a try. his HAL (Hardware Allocation Table) might have gotten messed up and this will fix that. If your HAL gets corrupted or does not read the correct hardware the system has a very difficult time loading... just a suggestion