Emergency Windows XP Computer Help Needed

[savedbygrace]

I need help.

Windows XP SP2 on my computer will not start. Earlier this morning, everything was going great, then Firefox locked up while doing a Google search. Locked up tight, and I had to press and hold the power button for several seconds to shut down.

Now, when I power up, everything goes well through POST until Windows tries to start up, then the screen goes black and all disk activity ceases. After waiting several minutes with nothing happening, pressing the power button for a fraction of a second shuts the computer down.

I've tried booting to Last Known Good Configuration - same result.

I've tried booting into Safe Mode - same results. When I boot so I can see each startup event happening, the last event that prints to the screen is:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS\FONTS\vgaoem.fon

Then, all disk activity ceases and nothing else happens.

I built this computer myself - it's a P4 2.4GHz with 1GB RAM on an Asus mobo.

I do not want to lose all the data on the boot drive. Some of it is not backed up since two days ago, including Quicken and QuickBooks.

One big obstacle is that I originally installed this from an early WinXP full install CD, before SP1, and I've updated through SP1 to SP2. So, booting from the install disc won't help. I do have an SP2 disc from Microsoft, but I doubt that is bootable.

Help!

[dennisw]

I lost a MB to bad capacitors, and the machine will not turn on without the caps. His machine turns on, so I don't think that's what we have here.

Also, the caps make a strong ozone smell when they fail. I thought my house was on fire. It's very noticable.

When I looked at the MB, the caps all had what looked like chalk coming out the top.
___________________________


I know that happens with some older motherboards, but I've never seen it. But I've seen lots of power supplies ruined by bad capacitors. The trashed power supply then (sometimes) takes out hard drives, motherboards, DVD drives. Memory and CPU was left intact

[dennisw]

Reseating is a very good approach. Here in Florida there's a lot more oxidation. I've reseated components numerous times and been successful

[TChris]

I lost a MB to bad capacitors, and the machine will not turn on without the caps. His machine turns on, so I don't think that's what we have here.

Also, the caps make a strong ozone smell when they fail. I thought my house was on fire. It's very noticable.

Not all capacitors fail in the same way or at the same rate. Most of our Dell machines failed slowly, exhibiting intermittent problems for a week or two before finally failing altogether.

Also, the capacitor problem goes back a couple of years, so if he has a MB with bad caps, it would have already failed.

I'm currently waiting for a replacement motherboard from Dell for a machine that just failed this week. Again, everyone's experience will vary.

[null and void]

Take your hard disk out of the system, put it in an external USB enclosure. Buy a Mac. Attach the enclosure and retrive your files.

awwwwwww man! I wanted to be first to say 'buy a Mac'...

[spudsmaki]

It's stopping at the fonts directory, my suspicion is the vgaoem font is fubared. A bad font will kill any OS like this, including Tiger and Linux.

See if you can reboot with an install CD and replace all the fonts the OS needs to run.

And a warning again, something you installed put in a bad font. And the only way to overwrite system fonts is to run in admin mode. Don't do that!

[FreePaul]

...problem was mostly confined to MSI mobos...

Not so. I've seen several manufacturer's boards with this problem. Apparently the capacitor manufacturer(s) put out a lot of defective product. There are some class action suits on this but I haven't kept up with them. Seems to be mostly on boards from four to six years ago.

[rarestia]

If it is truly a bad font, that chkdsk WILL fix that problem, esp. if it's a system font. I strongly suggest booting from the OS CD and when given the option, run the Recovery Console. That will take you to a DOS prompt. Run the chkdsk /f and that should do ya right. And I still think you should reseat the hardware, just in case.

[ShadowAce]

I know it's kinda late, since he's already had a ton of responses but....

TechSupport PING

[AmericaUnited]

Before you try doing an XP reinstall, make sure your hardware is sane.

Download the memtest86 memory diagnostic and burn it to a CD. Boot from it and test your memory.

Next you want to check if your hard drive has bad spots and that's why you system won't boot. No use trying a reinstall if the drive is not in good shape. There are several ways to do this. You could download a drive diagnostic from any of the biggies (Maxtor, Wsetern Digital, etc). You could also download and burn a bootable CD copy of knoppix. You'll be able to read your entire hard drive and see if their are any disk errors.

[shadowman99]

Another thing you could try (it's easy and won't hurt anything) is go into bios and look for your settings for "Hard Drive Pre Delay" or "Hard Drive Pre-Boot Delay". Sometimes giving an older hard drive a couple extra seconds to spin up before the machine attempts to boot will help. If the Delay is set to 3 seconds, try 6 or even 9.

It might do nothing, but again, it's easy, so try it before moving onto more complicated steps.

[VeniVidiVici]

This will be the third time I've had to take the same action in the past year or two.

So what did you do the other two times? ;-)

I agree it's the hard drive.

[steveo]

I had a very similar problem. My boot drive just 'wasn't there'. I found a program call driverescue that fixed it up first try. You can find it here:

http://www.woundedmoon.org/win32/driverescue19d.html

[sd-joe]

Check to make sure that there is not a floppy in the floppy drive. I am not joking.

[ShadowAce]

You could also download and burn a bootable CD copy of knoppix.

Knoppix also has the memtest option as well--at the boot prompt, just type in "memtest" without the quotes, and it will run the memtest86+ program.

[VeniVidiVici]

Either this month's or last month's copy of Linux has SimplyMepis CD attached to it. Works well.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Not a strange place to post this at all.
I'm here because I was pinged here from a robust and fully functioning ping list for geeks on FR.

[ShadowAce]

Yeah--I'm waiting for the 6.0 Final to be released so I can add it to my DVD image of 10 Linux Live CDs. Then it should be full, I think.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Since it seems you may have a serious hard drive issue, the first thing I would do is to take your drive out and slave it onto another system and then see if the data is accessible.

From there you can run some disk utilities like Spin-Rite to see what might be at fault.

[cowtowney]

"No, I'm not a real Geek. But, I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night........."

LOL

[Rick.Donaldson]

I just had the exact same thing occur a week ago. The hard drive had failed. I had to have a friend pull his equipment out and run some tests on the HD. Turns out it was completely dead, with exactly the same symtoms you're having. A new hard drive, and a week later I've completely rebuilt the system, and managed to save most of my data -- only because I do backups. I did lose a few things, but mostly I'm back online.

I'm sure you're having a similar problem. (mine was a laptop)