I am having serious, huge, mega, problems with my PC.

When I boot up, or restart, I get past the post, a black screen flashes and then I am given a DOS screen with all my hardwars details displayed in white outlined boxes. At the bottom of the screen is a flashing white box cursor, which doesn?t respond to my keyboard.

After a lot of persistence, I did eventually manage to get it to boot from my XP CD, with which I conducted a repair install, which made no difference whatsoever.

Again, after many, many, attempts, I managed to get Windows XP to start up. After the logo screen, a black screen hangs for several minutes, then the ?Windows is starting up? screen displays for another several minutes before displaying the welcome log in screen.

I managed to make a broadband connection, in the hope of finding some help, but I can no longer sign in to my ISP account, therefore, cannot access webpages or update my Antivirus, (which I had to re-install due to a message stating it was damaged). Also, I am now advised that there are no printers added, but when I try to add one, the service is unavailable.

I ran PC Bug this morning which found and fixed 52 errors, but I am still too scared to turn off my PC now, because at least I can access my personal documents (can?t live without my PC).

I am posting this message via my work PC, which, after today, I will not have access to until Monday afternoon. Can anybvody please PLEASE help.

I have thought about buying another hard drive, reinstalling windows and my programs and just copying over my data, but I am not entirely sure if this is the way to go.

Thanking you in advance.

Hi there Bipbop and welcome to PCHF!
Can you post your system specifications?
Are you using Windows XP Professional or Home Edition?
Did the problem came up after you changed something on your computer, have you e.g. installed any new hardware or something?

From memory I have:

AMD K7S8X
Maxtor 80GB
ATI Radeon 9200
512MB RAM
Win XP Pro
BTYahoo Broadband

I am not aware of any software changes that should have affected my PC, (unless PCBug, changed something).

No hardware changes have been carried out. All drivers seem to be OK (according to Device Manager).

I leave work in just 2 hours, (not back until monday), is there any advice anybody can offer me to get me back up and running for over the weekend?

Hi

Well, you could try a repair install - different to a "Repair" - see this link: http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

Did you by any change just update windows? (or autoupdate just installed updates?) It sounds like it could be problems with one of the latest MS patches:

http://www.pchelpforum.com/security-...-pc-havoc.html

Thank you for the replies, I shall have a look at trying these out over my long weekend (and it will be looooong, if I keep having problems).

I will let you know how I got on when I return on Monday (sooner if I get the thing up and running again).