[magusbuckley]

Hello:

My mom has decided last semester to return to collge. She aquired an old Compaq (I'd guess 5 years old at least) from a coworker. There were no discs or anything that came with the system. We purchased Windows XP Home w/SP2 and a printer for her. I had the rest.

After slicking the machine and installing Windows, I updated Windows and added her PC to my Windows Onecare account for security.

About 3 months passed and she called me to complain that the machine wouldn't turn on. It kept rebooting and rebooting and rebooting. It was stuck in a loop. I told Windows not to restart on error and rebooted again. A .dll file was missing. I tried to repair with the recovery console, but I couldn't get it going again. I had to reinstall Windows. Then, after a month or two, the same thing happend. For a second time, I reinstalled Windows, updated Windows, restored her data from an external drive, etc.

About two weeks passed and she called to say that the computer told her that she didn't have a printer installed. She was trying to print a document from the web. The funny thing is that she had just printed something earlier in the day.

We don't live close to one another so I remoted into her machine via logmein. I called and had her drop the Printer Driver CD into the drive. I installed the driver, but it said the hardware wasn't funcioning properly. I discovered that the printspooler service wasn't running so I started it. I was going to reboot to test the printer but saw that she had Windows updates waiting to install so I did that during the shut down. Then, I turned the PC back on. I can't believe it, but we managed to get into that same loop where some random Windows file is missing or corrupt.

I'm going to her house this weekend....AGAIN....to have a look at this PC. Before I make that trip, can any of you think of anything that might be causing this problem?

I'm taking a Hard Drive in case her drive is bad. I'm going to run Checkdisk on her drive to confirm that's what the problem is. If it isn't the drive, I'm wondering if it's the updates.

Although, I uninstalled the last several installed updates and that didn't seem to fix the problem this time.

Any and all information will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Magus

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I would suspect a hard drive issue.

[Neil Jones]

I would suspect a hard drive issue.

[The Skeptic]

I would also suspect the hard disk but would perform other tests as well. First, please run a memory scan with microsoft memeory diagnostic tool or with memtest. Second, use this link to PCPitstop. Register and run a complete system scan. This will give you an idea about the hardware condition.

[magusbuckley]

The Skeptic:

The problem, you see, is the the system won't boot. If I'm to run all of these tests from Windows as you suggest, I'd have to reinstall Windows. Then I could finally run tests to determine if the HD is bad. If it is, then I'm really screwed because I now have to put the new HD in and reinstall Windows again. Boy...that's an all day daunting task. Not sure I'm ready for that yet. But...I do appreciate the help.

I'm going to try a scandisk on the current HD and see what comes up. If it looks bad, I'll replace the HD with the new one. After installing Windows, I may download that progam as you suggest and run tests on all the hardware though.

Thanks for the information. If anyone else has any other ideas between now and Friday, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks,

Magus

[The Skeptic]

To test the memory you don't need windows. You create a bootable CD and run the test. The reason I suggest this is that I have seen cases in which the problems indicated very clearly to a hard disk failure. I replaced the disk only to find out that the problem was still there. The problem was with the memory and it manifested itself exactly like a hard disk problem. Since then I run a short memory test whenever I suspect a hard disk problem (5-10 minutes. As a matter of fact I run it now with every hardware diagnosis that I do.).

[Ztruker]

You can also download the diagnostic utility from the hard drive manufacturers web site and run it, see if it finds anything wrong with the drive.

It will be available as a diskette image or a CD iso image, both of which you boot directly, not run under Windows.