Hi there.

My brother is having a problem with his PC not booting up into Windows XP. He can't get on the net so I'm asking on his behalf.

When he turns the PC on he gets the message:

"We apologise for the inconvenience, but Windows did not start successfully. A recent hardware or software change might have caused this.

If your computer stopped responding, restarted unexpectedly or was automatically shutdown to protect your files and folders, choose Last Known Good Configuration to revert to the most recent settings that worked."

Every option that is chosen (Safe mode, Last Known Configuration, Start Windows Normally) makes the PC turn off and try to boot again always returning to this message.

I've tried searching for information on this error and have found some instances of it happening to people, but no conclusions as to what the problem is.

I have suggested to him to try a repair by booting with the Windows XP CD in and I guess this would be the first thing to try as per the sticky thread in this forum.

In the meantime, I just wondered if anyone knew a bit more about this? It's going to be a real disaster if he loses his hard disk.

Thanks in advance.

He has come back and said that when booting from the CD, when he gets to the point where it tried to find existing copies of Windows and does not find any.

In the sticky it says "This may happen if the data or partition on your drive is too corrupted."

It doesn't suggest anything to try at this point.

Would trying to repair using the recovery console be worth trying next?

I have found the list of commands you use with it but I'm not sure which would be the most sensible to try first.

Does anyone know anywhere that gives good advice on this? Or can anyone suggest any steps to take next?

Thanks again.

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

You don't say whether it is a Home or Pro flavor of XP. The Recovery Console is only on Pro, and must be set up ahead of time.

http://www.helpwithwindows.com/WindowsXP/howto-18.html

Johanna

I was haveing the exact same problem last week and week before. Lucky I use Norton GGhost and had a ghost copy of my hard drive. I ran that and it worked great the system worked good for two days and crashed the same way again. I ran the ghost again and it worked again. Then we took a big electrical hit in a storm and before I could shut down my system froze up. So I just turned it off cold. The nex day after the storm I rebooted and it did some kind of disk scan and started. I have had no problem since then. I worked for days trying to get back up. All I need was an electrical Storm. there was a guy here helping me he seemed to know his crap. I will find his name, maybe you can find him.I think he may be able to help you. good luck

gerryf was the guy helping me with this same problem in this forum. He seemed to know what he was doing. Maybe you can find him. He was staff