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I'm back again. Four weeks after the video card overheated and fried.


I was playing a game today, Sim City 3000. I turned the moniter off while the game was minimized. And turned it back on a few seconds later. The game crashed. Something popped up saying something like there was an "unexpected error" and it crashed the game. so i reopened the game. and a few minutes later the same thing happened only it froze completely. so i turned the computer off. and ever since it won't go into XP at all what so ever.

It just does the normal start up stuff but right when it would go to XP it just goes on into a loop. then it would give me the option of going into the last known settings that worked. which does not work. neither does the 3 different kinds of safe modes. they all do the same thing . just the loop of doing the start up over and over.

the last thing that happened was fixable. but this. i don't know what there is to do. i went into the setup bios not knowing anything. i thought that maybe the computer wasn't reading the hard drive and just going around an around but what do i know.

if anyone can help. please lend a hand. thanks.



I swear if this ever gets fixed i'm going to back all the important stuff up... I kept putting it off. and now its messed up again. if it is fixable maybe i'll get an external 160gig hard drive and put all the stuff on that..

Hi Knives2276,

Here's a check you can run on your hard drive. Insert your windows XP disk, press r to go into the recovery console, then type in chkdsk. It will check your disk for errors. If non come up it may be a RAM problem. To check your RAM check under your system's BIOS for a memory testing tool. To get into the BIOS screen it may tell you what button to press at startup, if not try delete or escape.

- Nathan

thanks for the reply.


Put the disk in and press R while the computer is doing its start up thing? thats the only thing that it does. will anything work while its doing that?

Put the disk in. If the blue windows setup screen dosn't come up right away go into your BIOS, and select your CD-ROM drive as the first boot device, followed by the hard drive. When you are at the blue windows setup disk screen, press r.

ok i'll give that a try. hold on.

i did what you said. it checked the disk. and said there was no errors. it also said at the end that windows xp wasn't installed on the computer.. which freaked me out a little..

how is the ramcheck done? i went into the bios and saw nothing about it. i did see stuff on ram. i have a amd 64 fx-51 . with 1024 of ddr ecc ram. .


:computer_

Some BIOSes don't have memory checking tools. But there is another you can use. You'll need to download this: http://www.memtest86.com/memt32.zip it's a program called memtest86. Once downloaded, unzip it, insert a blank floppy and hit install.bat. Then follow the instructions. Reboot the computer, go into the BIOS and select the floppy drive as the first boot device, the same way you did for the CD. Then memtest86 will test your memory for errors. If non exist, then your hard drive data is most likely corrupt. If an error exists you will need to get new RAM.