Hello,

I have a "different" xp professional startup problem that I was hoping someone may have seen before.

One of my machines stopped booting after a power failure (which may have been coincidental). It starts normally and shows the windows xp startup screen with the moving bar. After a little while the screen goes black and the drive activity light stops flashing. At this point it appears hung and the only thing that I can do is hit reset or power it down.

I am able to start in safe mode.
I am able to start in safe mode with networking, but the network card does not show up.
If I try to start in VGA mode, it dies the same way that it does in normal mode.

The "different" part is that I am able to start in "debugging" mode. In this mode, the machine starts just like it used to in "normal" mode with networking and the old video and sound settings are all working.

While in this mode, I have run sfc /scannow and it did not report any issues.

From safe mode I have tried to use msconfig to selectively turn off system.ini and win.ini as well as "load startup items." None of this made any difference.

I have also tried to roll back to previous restore points without any success.

I have run a complete virus scan and a scan with spybot both which came back clean.


I would appreciate any suggestions for what to try next. This system has a SATA 0+1 raid on it, so I would prefer to not have to do a repair on it. It also seems to me that if it can successfully boot in the "debugging" mode that all the system files are intact.

Thanks for your assistance and please let me know if I can submit any other information that may be helpful.

Gleneagles

Howdy Gleneagles and welcome to the forums,
Can you try this for us. Boot into safe mode or debug mode and reisntall your video card driver. I had this happen once a while ago and it turned out to be my vido driver was corrupt. Sounds wierd but thats what it was.

As for Msconfig, try turning all on, and maybe go into BIOS and load safe defaults.

Gleneagles,

Since you havn't been welcomed by a staff member yet, welcome to PCHF .

I see asa_sniper has the situation under control, so I will step back and let him work his magic .

Hello asa_sniper,

Thank you very much for your assistance.
I downloaded the latest video driver from nvidia onto the stricken machine. I first removed the old driver and then installed the new driver on the machine. Unfortunately, the machine does still not start in normal mode although it still starts fine in "debugging" mode.

I also set the msconfig startup back to the previous startup configuration without any success.

Do you know what the real difference between "debugging" mode and "normal" startup is? From reading the description on the microsoft web site, it appears that this mode is normal startup mode with (I guess) a log file being sent out on a COM port.

I have not yet tried the fail-safe setting in BIOS. I will have to read up on what the implications of this mode is before I try this.

Any other suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks very much for you assistance.

Gleneagles

Hello,

I was wondering if there were any other suggestions as to what I could try to get my problem fixed?

Thanks!

Gleneagles