After installing Norton Ghost, began to do live-update and XP freezes

Status
Not open for further replies.

Blaine B.

Beta member
Messages
3
Location
Northwest Indiana
Within the past month or two I have been experiencing random freezing/crashing with one of my two systems. Every week or two weeks the system will freeze up randomly. Either I will be reading something, watching a YouTube video, or the system will simply be idling while I am away; and then it will just lock up and freeze. Nothing will happen except nothing responds. No key commands do anything nor does the mouse move. A hard restart will be necessary which will then stop XP from booting up properly, getting hung on the XP loading screen is most common. I will have to go into safe mode and do a system restore; which always fixes everything until a few weeks later, up until TONIGHT.

Due to these strange occurances I thought it was a good idea to get Norton Ghost Version 14. I remember throroughly enjoying Gateway GoBack in the days of Windows Millenium Edition..... So I installed Norton Ghost on my second system (the machine NOT experiencing the random freezing/crashing) yesterday, updated it, and backed up everything...and that went totally flawless!

Tonight I installed Norton Ghost on my first machine (the one with the "issues")

The install went flawlessly. Rebooted, then entered the product serial key and went to live update to update Ghost.

During the liveupdate installtion process (after downloading and uncompressing the update) my system froze up. NOW I am not sure if this has something to do with Ghost itself OR that it is a coincidence. It has been a few weeks since the last freeze or crash and wouldn't you know it that it had to occur at the SAME TIME that I am installing Ghost (which I hoped would make things MUCH easier in the event of a future crash! I kind of hate formatting and reinstalling XP from MANY previous experiences....)

So I hard rebooted the system. No XP loading screen would even display! I did a few more hard reboots and nothing. No XP loading screen or operating system options window (to select safe mode)

So just for the heck of it I popped in the Norton CD to access the "vanilla" restoration settings. Booted up off of the CD to check out the menu. Now you know there are no backups from Ghost for this system yet, so I just checked out the menus and exited and restarted again.

When I restarted this time, Windows XP began to load but never got off of the loading screen. It just kept loading and loading and loading until I did another hard reboot.

This time I got to select safe mode, finally.

When loading safemode, it got hung with "mup.sys" being the last file to display. Right after it asked me if I wanted to hit escape to skip loading SPTD.sys.

So I did yet another hard reboot and selected safe mode once more, this time I hit escape to skip the loading of SPTD.sys. After that I got a blank screen and nothing ever happend after that.

Onto ANOTHER hard reboot. This time I selected to run XP normally with last known good configuration.

Windows loaded to the Welcome Screen to the point where I could use the mouse, but never progressed to the desktop. It just hung on the welcome screen while I could spin the mouse around forever.

So another hard reboot. I tried safe mode again, hit escape to skip SPTD.sys, and FINALLY GOT INTO SAFE MODE!

I went to system restore (as I always have) and what do you know, there is only one restore point available. It was made automatically by XP since I installed Norton Ghost. I set my restore point space usage on the harddrive down low and do manually create restore points from time to time. Apparently XP deleted my other restore point and wrote over it with this restore point from installing Norton Ghost.

I tried to do the restore. Well it was restoring and got about 1/3 through and the system locked up, mouse froze and the restoration would not progress any further.

I did a hard reboot, got into safe mode once more (I forget if I skipped SPTD.sys or not) and tried to do the system restore again. This time it progress about 3/4 through but then once again froze up!

I did ONE MORE hard reboot and tried to start up windows normally. It got to the loading screen, completed, then it was about to go to the welcome screen (my CRT monitor always goes to sleep mode momentairily then wakes back up every time before the welcome screen) but this time it just stayed on sleep mode and never woke back up.

I turned off the system at this point and quit for the night.

What do you think is my cause here? It appears I can get into safe mode no problem now but doing the system restore as well as booting up into windows normally is definitely a NO GO.

Feel free to reply.....thanks in advance.

OH and by the way, whenever the system freezes or locks up, I can see the processor temperature rising with my LCD display. Not sure if that is out of the ordinary or not since I am sure the processor gets stuck at 100% load.

The specs of the problematic system are:

AMD FX-60 Processor
2 Seagate 320 gb harddrives (Primary C: programs and OS drive and seperate non-raid G: files/documents drive)
2 gb PC3200 DDR RAM
Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro 256 mb
Asus A8N 32-SLI-Deluxe MOBO
Creative X-FI XtremeMusic
Windows XP Home
 
I have tried repair installs before with Windows XP and was never happy with the outcome. Sure I had all of my programs but they never showed up in the start menu.

If anything I always do a format and reinstall.

Although I am getting tired of it, with this system it seems something always happens and I am forced to go through the lengthy procedure multiple times per year. I am sure it would help if I did not have so many programs.

I was hoping to salvage windows again this time though. I mean I can get into safe mode, usually when I am forced to format I cannot even get into safe mode!
 
Your best option to salvage is going to be the Repair. It shouldnt affect the Start Menu at all. If so go into Safe Mode first, copy the Start Menu as it is now to a different location, then just paste it back after the repair.
 
Well this is odd. I was going to go directly to safe mode and uninstall Norton Ghost yesterday, but for the heck of it I just let XP start normally. It booted up just fine! I created a Ghost backup as well as a recovery CD and "lights out" recovery, updated my video and sound drivers, and everything was fine. Also created another Windows Restore point and increased the Windows Restore allowed space from 1% to 5%. Besides that I ran an AVG virus scan and nothing was found to be out of the ordinary.

Later that night I was creating another Ghost restore point and then I went away for awhile. I came back to the system and it was on the "blue screen of death" saying error "Kernel_Data_Inpage_Error"

Did a hard reboot and it has been fine since.

I checked around and found something about running this application that would defrag the registry and page files.....well I opened the app and it only listed about 1 fragmented file per folder. Barely anything.

Still not sure what is to blame here, but I thought it was odd the system worked yesterday with the exception of the BSOD.

Thanks.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom