I hope someone can help me. Nobody seems to be able to figure out this problem so far. There is something corrupt on my system which prevents me from booting up to Windows. I am operating currently because I did a complete system recovery using Norton Save & Restore (back to 7/31). I have a newer recovery point (8/14) but the computer won't boot up if I restore to that recovery point. So as of right now, if I attempt to restart the computer, it will crash. It stops right after the BIOS test and will not get to Windows.....so I have NO Safe Mode option. I have tried a repair using the Windows Setup disk. It did not solve the problem and I could not get to Windows when it rebooted after doing the repair. I am running Windows XP Professional SP2. I had issues previously (and this problem may involve) with Windows Update KB933566. In fact, I turned off my automatic updates because I believed this had caused my problem before. When it has tried to install automatically, it fails. Microsoft was not able to solve my problem at the time and I had to completely reformat the drive and reinstall everything. This is also NOT a hardware issue as far as I know. I am working on a Dell Dimension 8100 with 1GB RAM and a new WD 250GB hard drive. I have run a diagnostic on the hard drive and it is working fine.

I downloaded HijackThis 2.0 and did a scan. I can post the log if that would be useful. Just let me know which forum to post it on.

Please help if you can. I don't know what else to do short of reformatting yet again.




THANKS!!!!!
Tracy

Hi Tracy and welcome to PCHF!

Firstly, I would like you to insert your Windows Re-Install CD into the CD drive and go to start > run and type in sfc /scannow. Let me know if that fixes any files. If it doesn't, it will just close itself.

Second, please take a look at the Prework link that is in my signature. Let a member of our security team take a look at your HijackThis log and then we will finish up here. Let me know when you get the all clean from the security team with a reply and we will see if the problem still exists.

Thanks,
Adam

Hi Adam,

Thanks so much for responding. I started by running the Windows File Protection scan and got a message that said "Files that are required to run Windows properly must be copied to the DLL cache." I am running Windows XP Professional SP2....and this IS the CD I inserted. I have an XP Home Edition on a slave drive (also in this computer) but the system never even gets to read that drive as it is not in the boot sequence. Nevertheless, I tried putting in the XP Home CD and it then said "The CD you provided is the wrong CD. Please insert the Windows XP Professional CD-ROM into your CD-ROM drive." So I put the XP Professional back in and it slowly went back to scanning the files. It gave me that message several more times and I just kept hitting retry....and it proceeded. It finally ended and closed as you suggested it might.

I am about to post the HijackThis log as you instructed and will write back as soon as I have a reply.

Thanks again,

Tracy

Ok, it sounds like it did restore some files. This might be a malware issue. Take a look at the Prework link that is in my signature and when you get the all clean from our security team post back here and we will see if you are still having the problems.

Thanks,
Adam