Right i will start with some specifications for you

HP COMPAQ Presrio C300 Laptop

2 Years Old

running XP Home

Norton Internet security (Crap i know)


Basically, I was using my laptop last week, did some emailing, done some game playing, Switched laptop off in usual manner, came back six hours later, switched laptop back on, as the computer starts to load, the screen froze for a couple of seconds, screen went black and rebooted itself. It will keep on rebooting itself continuously as it fails to start up.

NOW, with what knowledge i do have, I waited for it to restart and pressed F5 to get into it in Safe Mode, but again it will reboot before yetting anywhere

So then I though the worst and so when it rebooted I pressed F11 to do a system recovery. IT DID NOT reboot during this and actually carried out the system recovery which took about 45 minutes, it said it was succesful upon completion and so the laptop restarted but the same problem happening as before. restarting after failing to load.
When system restarted I pressed F10 to do a Hard Drive check which took about an hour but the hard drive passed its test and had no problems. But my laptop will still not get far in loading, as soon as the COMPAQ screen appears it will reboot.

ANY IDEAS PLEASE
I AM DESPERATE

Start the laptop as normal, keep tapping F8. You may get prompted as to what drive to boot from, select hard drive and keep tapping F8.
When you get the XP start-up menu option, go up to the "Disable automatic restart" option and press Enter. This should now stop the computer restarting and give you a blue screen, what does that blue screen say please?

Ok

The blue screen says the following


A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer

If this is the first time you have seen this stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps;

Disable or unistall any anti virus, disk defragmentation or back up utilities. Check your hard drive configuration, and check for any updated drivers. Run CHKDSK / F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart your computer.

Technical information
*** STOP: 0x00000024 (0x00190203, 0x86539868, 0xc0000102, 0x00000000)

A stop 0x24 error is typically an issue with either the file system or the hard drive, though it can also be caused by fragmentation, anti-virus software (typically more than one of on the same system) or an issue with drive-mirroring software.

Simpliest thing to do is run CHKDSK from the Recovery Console. You can do this by booting off an XP CD, any XP CD, then pressing R when prompted, presssing the entry for (typically) C:\Windows, entering any administrator password present (or press Enter if its blank) and pressing Enter. Type "CHKDSK /P /R" and press Enter. This may take a while, possibly well over an hour, if it runs at all.

If you get no option to choose a Windows installation, just do the CHKDSK as per usual.
If you see a message containing the phrase "unrecoverable problems", you need a new hard drive.