Hi,

I have a real problem with my PC. It happened last year and I want to avoid
having to reformat and reinstall everything again if possible.

Basically, the PC boots as normal into XP but it only gets as far as the welcome screen with the little blue/white scrolling load bar. It then suddenly cuts to BSOD (but it doesn't give me enough time to read what it says) before rebooting.

I tried to repair the installation using my XP CD-ROM but it didn't recognise a
windows installation and said a partition had to be created.

My limited PC knowledge is saying to me that this is a hard drive problem but is there anything I can do to avoid a complete re-format and re-install please? Has anyone had this before and knows exactly what the problem is?

Hello Infinate

Welcome to PC Help Forums

Make sure your boot sequence is set to boot from cdrom first then go into Safe Mode by pressing F8 on boot up.
Try a repair from there.

Thanks for the welcome Wolfie.

Unfortunately, it won't complete any of the available actions ie:

Start in Safe Mode
Start with Last Known Good Configuration
Start Windows Normally

etc.

They all go through this long list of DOS type long commands before hanging.......then going through to the Windows loading screen....and then crashing and rebooting.

It's just stuck in that cycle and like I say, if I boot from the XP CD-ROM, it says it can't even find the Windows installation.

The only additional info I can think of is that it's taken longer and longer for Windows to shut down lately but that's about all I'm afraid.

Mmmm ok so you can't get into Safe mode at all.
Do you have a spare 98 boot floppy kicking about?

One of our IT people are putting an XP boot disk together. Just the basics such as CD drivers and all the usual stuff.

Your own XP disk will have all the boot files on etc

Ah, OK - what shall I do?