[RESOLVED] [Pro] windows log in not working

[judge john]

hi,
for no apparent reason my pc will no longer load XP. everything seems to work fine and the 'windows loading' page comes up, but after that the screen goes black and just stays like that. it doesn't respond at all to anything. i have tried using the restore option on the XP CD but that has not solved it. i have also managed to get it working under safe mode but it shut it's self down after about 3 min. i don't know what to try next.

[SuperSparks]

It could be a hard drive problem. I looked at a laptop the other week that had very similar symptoms. Download and run the hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic utility (they run from floppy, there is no need to boot into Windows), and see what that says. Here are the most common ones:

Seagate Seatools (handles Maxtor drives too)

IBM / Hitachi Drive Fitness Test

Western Digital Software & Drivers

Fujitsu Utilities

Samsung Drive Utilities

[dunedin]

judge john

If the drive is OK try the following
Boot up with the XP installation disk in the drive.
Select the first “R” which is the Recovery Console

At the command prompt type
fixmbr
ENTER

Then
fixboot
ENTER

Elaine

[judge john]

well their is a slight problem with using the floppy disk as my pc has not got a floppy drive. i tried the recovery console idea but it had no effect

[SuperSparks]

In that case, download this and burn it to a CDR - it has all those utilities on it, plus many other useful apps. It is a bootable CD, so you don't need to bother with a floppy.

Ultimate Boot CD

[judge john]

well i have decided that i might as well make the most of this moment. so i have bought a new HD as my other ones where full anyway and will install vista on it. if it's the HD then this should confirm that. oterwise i'm not so sure.

[dunedin]

That`s one way to find out right enough

Good luck and let us know how it turns out

Elaine

[judge john]

well looks like you where spot on so far super. installed vista ulitamte on a new 400GB HD, not that i needed so much but it was sooo cheap!, and all is working fine. now i'm just trying to get all the important stuff of the other drive. and thankfully all is going well so far, haven't lost anything. i'll get everything i need and then formatt the drive and see if there is a problem or if i can still keep using the drive to store data. thanks dunedin as well

p.s: Vista gets a lot of stick, as M$ always do, but on the whole i think they have done a great job. so far evything is so much smoother and easier in general and it's the little things that make a big difference. like being able to see the file transfer speeds when copying from other drives etc. only problem is it takes up a ton of memory. i was surprised how good XP xould run on 1GB of PC-6400 but i thing another is needed for vista.

cheers..

[SuperSparks]

I'm glad to hear you got it all up and running again

I like Vista too, I've been using it as my main OS since last November. I'd definitely recommed that you get another gig of RAM though.