WinXP Won't Start

[TheMajor]

umm, you cannot go to safe mode from your bios. you have to press F8 before the blue/greem xp loading bar appears. But your XP is ****ed up so you got a problem.

Did you try system restore (F2) from XP disc?
You can also enter the recovery console after booting from ur XP disc ("R") and type "chkdsk /r" to do a scandisk

or type sfc /scannow to search for replaced or corrupted system files.

 

[Roshi229]

safe mode is not managed by the bios, therefore you won't be able to get into safemode through the bios. sorry.
there should be an option somewhere on that blue screen to restore windows, but this is starting to sound like you're mbr is messed up
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q69013/
read over this article and see if it helps.

 

[m3incorp]

Using the XP CD, I selected the option to do a recovery (keep in mind this is a CD from another computer,) It came back with could not find files on that drive and showed the C drive. I switched to the D drive and ran CHKDSK which came back with the volume appears to contain one or more errors that are not recoverable. I am trying the other commands. I don't know if the system restore discs would help at this point. Since I will be able to have them next week, I will try them and if they don't work, try reformatting hard drive and install a brand new WinXP.. Any other suggestions.

 

[Rizinc4]

Use DOS to format your hard drive... when you boot your machine press F8 until a screen loads with the option to run Command Prompt Only, select this and hit enter. Now you should be able to type, simply type format c:. It will prompt you saying you are about to lose all of your data, just say "Y" and continue. When that is finished pop your XP disk in and let your machine reboot.

 

[m3incorp]

It won't let me boot in to DOS mode. I can hold the F8 key forever and the only thing that I get is: Disk boot failure, Insert System disk and press enter.

 

[m3incorp]

I think that I will install the hd in my computer in slave mode to see if any files can be read on it.

 

[Roshi229]

Disk boot failure, Insert System disk and press enter

take the flopy out of the drive j/k


good call on slaving the disk, just be careful it's clean, don't want a virus...
i'm convincing myself that your partition tables are screwy, or the mbr is destroyed...
let us know how it goes with the slave drive

 

[m3incorp]

OK, now have the drive in the computer that I am currently on. It shows up in windows explorer as Presario_rp as the D Drive. Funny thing is that the only folder in it is a Recovery folder that does not open.

 

[m3incorp]

Is it possible for me to format it while it is in this computer? Or should I just wait until I get my hands on the recovery cds from the computer that it came out of and restore it in that computer?

 

[TheMajor]

you can format wherever u want, whenever you want.