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XP Pro won't boot.


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#1
RjBass

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So one of the computers here in the office decided to not boot all of a sudden. I thought that maybe for some weird reason that something in the boot files got messed up (possibly due to a virus or something) so I went to do a repair of windows. However even after the install disk copied the nessessary files, it still won't boot up to reinstall them.

I think at this point it is some sort of a hardware issue. I ran Win Mem Test and it came up with nothing, and am now running a hard drive diagnostic. If that comes up dry I will run PC Check, but after that I have to say I'm a bit lost.

Is their something else that I might be missing here? Anybody have any suggestions?
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#2
wannabe1

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Hi RjBass...

When you try to boot, is there any specific error message, or will it just not boot?

Boot to the XP installation cd. At the Welcome to Setup screen, press R to load Recovery Console.

You should get to a screen that shows your operating system (1: C:\WINDOWS)...press 1 and then "Enter". You will then be prompted for the Administrator password...if you have not set a password, just press "Enter".

You should now get the command prompt C:\WINDOWS>

Type chkdsk /r and press "Enter".

You will likely be told the drive is busy and asked of you wish to schedule this to run on the next boot. Type Y and press "Enter".

Back at command prompt, type exit and press "Enter" to quit Recovery Console. The machine should reboot. Upon restarting, CHKDSK will run 5 stages...this will take a while, be patient. 60 to 90 minutes is not unusual for this.

When this completes, it should boot to Windows. Let me know how this goes.

wannabe1

Edited by wannabe1, 20 December 2006 - 12:59 PM.

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#3
RjBass

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Well the blue screen of death appears, but it is on so briefly that I can't make out any of what it says.

I would try your task, but at this point I already have MiniPE loaded and am just gonna save all the documents to a network drive or flash drive and continue on from there with a fresh install.

Before I get into that though, does anybody have any idea where Outlook stores all of the personal folders so that I can copy those as well?
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#4
piper

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C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
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#5
RjBass

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wurd, thanks.
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#6
RjBass

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Well Im not sure what the problem was, as none of my diagnostic utilities could come up with any hardware problems, and no viruses were found either that could have caused the crash.

Regardless I reinstalled Windows and all seems fine again.

Fortunatly I will have the machine up and running by 8:30am tomorrow morning. Thanks for your help.
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