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Colby Spindles

Dear All

I have been having some problems with my PC. Over the course of the last few months it has progressively gotten worse. Now it can take ages to boot into XP.

Basically from switch on, you see the hard drive light come on followed by the DVD writer seek light and then the CD-Rom seek light. The screen is normally black. I also get the keyboard and mouse lighting up in sequence. It appears to stay on a loop and repeats the above over and over again with nothing really loading on the screen. When it finally moves on after countless loops, I get the XP loading screen and then I get the blue screen that says 'checking for consistency of C drive'. At this point if I do not skip the disc checking it stays at 0% and gets nowhere. If however I catch it in time and choose to skip the disc checking, it boots into XP almost normally.

Please help!

Capt_beard

What kind of machine are you running? What hardware does it have?

You may want to look into updating your bios.

another alternative would be a fresh install of xp

Colby Spindles · 07:42 PM

The system is a few years old now:

Motherboard: Epox 8KRA2+
CPU: AMD Athlon XP
Memory: 1GB Corsair PC2700 (512 + 256 +256)
HD: Seagate Barracuda ATA (not SATA!)

And another thing. At the weekend I attempted to install a brand new hard disk with XP. With the XP CD in the drive and BIOS booting from CD first, I was able to partition the drive. However whilst it was installing Windows, it completely hung. Now it doesn't even see that hard disk in the BIOS even when it is physically connected.

I reverted back to my existing hard disk and I am still having the boot up problems described in my first post. The motherboard does have a double seven segment display. During the boot up loop it seems to show C1 a lot. The manual states that C1 is a memory error. I have tried all combinations of memory in all combinations of DIMM slot and no change

CS