Serious Problem?

[Alien18]

Hi All,

I yesterday I got a new laptop and wanted to be able to share files between it and my pc. So I ran the network setup wizard on my PC (both are running XP btw) as I have done on PCs a fair few times before.

It did what it needed to do then asked to restart. I restarted and now It freezes on the windows boot screen. The blue scrolly bit at under the logo actually freezes.

So i tried starting up in Safemode with networking, that didn't work - it froze too!.

So i tried plain old Safe mode, that worked - so I told it to shutdown (many times in the past simply doing a correct start up and shutdown in safe mode would fix whatever problem I've had) But this tie it freezes on the "Windows is shutting down" screen!!!

So I try doing a system restore in safemode but it still freezes when shutting down and although it says the restore is complete on the next safemode boot up i'm still having the same problem.

My last attempt to boot in to safemode resulted in a freeze before getting to XP.

One of the first things I tried was using my Windows XP disk and run repair but, yeh you guessed it, that freezes too!!! Right at the screen where it says at te bottom "Starting Windows" or something like that.

Does anyone have any suggestions please?

I'd like to be able to get into the DOS prompt to run chkdsk (or scandisk) whatever but cant seem to get to it. I'm guessing there might be some bad sectors on my HDD.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Many thanks in advance.

 

[fumbles]

Try hitting F8 before XP loads and select "Last Known Good Configuration".

Seems to do the trick for me...

I dont think it would be bad sectors, but the manufacture of your hdd should have a boot disk in which has diagnostic tools that will check the status of your hdd. Or you could hit safe mode with command prompt instead.

 

[Alien18]

Hi thanks for your reply.

I did try the Last Known Config thing but it has never ever worked for me.

It seems to be working now for some reason it worked when I booted with boot logging on.

But now my PSU (i think its that anyway) is making a strange high pitch whistling noise even when the computer is shut down the only way to stop it is to unplug the power. It's an Antec PSU and its less than 12 months old (I bought it from OCUK) does you think it may need replacing? My PC is currently taking forever to shutdown too!

Again, any help will be much appreciated.

 

[Sinque]

'The sound is due to a choke(or coil for you that didn't know), that is not as tightly wound around it's ferrite bead core. Basically pretty much all power supply units are of the switching kind and of course this means that some of the circuitry operates at high frequencies. Sometimes the harmonics of the switching cicuit will cause some of the chokes/coils to loosen from their cores a bit and this vibration can become audible to the human ear.

Most likely the power supply will work just fine however, since it's making an audible noise, you really can't just listen to it all the time you're using your machine so really the most cost effective option is to purchase a new one.

Yes you could attempt to find the noisy component by using a plastic or insulated tool to poke around in the open power supply cage, but that means having to remove it's cover, then laying your machine on it's side to have the open PS facing towards you and then having the machine turned on so you can locate this component. Takes a lot of time so you decide. '

Quick google, not sure about it as it's still doing it as it's turned off.

 

[bledd]

just a hint..

last known good config is overwritten during a logon, so if you get a load of messages before the logon screen, its a good idea to reboot, F8 and choose last known good config