System Won't Boot

[stiffyboy]

Hey I was wondering if anyone could help or tell me what the problem is.

I have a system which has trouble booting.

It's not too old only about 2 years or so and has been having problems lately.

-takes a long time to boot, sometimes stuck on the very first boot page with no option to continue or anything, and sometimes I can't even get into the setup by pressing DEL. (has trouble identifying all/any my IDE drives i think)

-when Windows XP eventually loads, nothing happens, I only see my desktop picture. I have to go into Task Manager to end explorer.exe and then run it again for explorer to load.

-once I'm in I start a program, iTunes let's say, and it takes literally 2-5 mins to load, this applies to nearly all programs I try to start up.

Then most recently the system won't even boot.

-the booting up seems ok but after the "verifying DMI pools" it comes up with the page where you choose to start Windows in Safe Mode, Safe Mode with networking, Safe Mode with MS-DOS, Last Known Good Configuration and Start Windows normally.
-I have tried every one of those options and each time it starts loading the screen where you see the Windos XP logo and the loading bar. However, after that, the screen flashes, in less than a second, with a blue page with about 2 paragraphs of white writing and then one line underneath with some sort of code. It flashes so fast I can't read it at all. So after the flash it just restarts my system and it starts all over again bringing me back to that same page with those options.

-I have tried going into CMOS and choosing to load the "fail-safe defaults" and "optimized defaults" with no effect.

-The motherboard is an Abit uGuru KV8 PRO
-The Processor is an AMD Sempron 1.8GHz, although the BIOS sees it as an "AMD Hammer Family Processor".
-The RAM is just regular 1gb(2x512)
-The Graphics card is a GF 6200A 256MB

Can anyone help me or has seen something similar?

If anyone wants any more information about the system please ask!

Cheers in advance.

"stiffyboy"

P.S. - By the way, I'm pretty novice when it comes to this sort of thing, so I might not understand some technical terms you might say.

 

[stiffyboy]

ok cheers, i'll have a read now.

(edit) - ok just had a read of it now and it seems to make sense as to why my system was running so slow. But the problem is I can't get into the Task Manager on that system to check because the system won't boot. :S

Is there any way I can see how much the system is paging without going into Windows?

 

[stiffyboy]

Have you had the case open to have a look inside? If you're a novice, and this hasn't been done for two years then I'd imagine there being a shed load of dust inside. This causes overheating and random errors. I'd take the cover off and blast it all out with a can of compressed air.

funny you should say that because I actually opened it very recently because the gfx card heatsink/fan was making a proper weird noise, I cleared out some dust and it was all better. And yeah that sounds quite a plausible cause to my problem too, since there is a mountain of dust in there. I'll dust it out and see what happens.

what do you mean by compressed air? where can i get some?

in fact I'm gonna do what Huddy said and clear out the CMOS first before i clean the whole thing and see what happens.

the hard drive is 200gb I believe, and I'm quite sure that it's not too full

 

[stiffyboy]

ok I just cleaned out my system with a hairdryer and I put it on COLD because I'm not that thick! lol. (The air coming out of the dryer was definately cold, not hot at all)

Anyway, I also replaced the CMOS battery.

This time it booted up with the message, as Huddy said, "checksum error"

I press F1 to continue and this time it loads the windows logo again, restarts the system, but then it loads this blue screen titled:

"VIA Tech. VT8237 SATA RAID BIOS Ver 4.31"

In the top right part of the screen there is a red "NOTICE" that flashes with a message under it, also in red, saying "The number of disks is not adequate to create RAID!!!" (yes there are 3 exclamation marks)

Under that it has the options:

F1 : View Array/disk Status
Up, Down: Move to next item
Enter : Confirm the selection
ESC : Exit

The only option that I can use is the ESC option which when pressed, it asks me "Do you really want to exit the utility? (Y/N)"

In the top left part of the screen there is a list of options which seem to be faded out ie. not selectable:

>Create Array
>Delete Array
>Create/Delete Spare
>Select Boot Array
>Serial Number View

On the bottom half of the screen there is a table that looks like this:

Channel | Drive Name | Array Name | Mode | Size(GB) | Status
Serial_Ch0 Master No Drive
Serial_Ch1 Master No Drive

(The "Serial_..." bit is under the "Channel" column and the "No Drive" bit is underneath the Drive name colum)

Any ideas?

cheers.

 

[stiffyboy]

how do i reset the BIOS?

ok

 

[stiffyboy]

ok cheers mate.

 

[stiffyboy]

I'm not 100% sure i'll have a look. At the moment the start screen loads but doesn't show the drive, when it does show it goes so quick i can't see it. My gut instinct is that it's an IDE drive because i haven't seen the letters SATA in the start up screen at all.

But i've ran into another problem... The actual DVD drive won't open, i can hear it trying to open when i press eject but it gets stuck. I've even tried using the pin hole thing with no luck. i'm gonna take the DVD-Drive out and try and fix it.

cheers for the link.

 

[stiffyboy]

ok. Just disassembled my DVD drive, had to break the warranty seal but was worth it in the end! Seems I over poked the pinhole and forced the plastic cog upwards, therefore the sliding mechanism didn't work... reassembled it, and it works! so chuffed with myself! lol!

ANYWAY...

Yes split, the HDD is IDE. So does that mean my BIOS is trying to load a SATA drive that doesn't exist? or were you unsure about that.

Anyway I'm booting from CDROM at the mo, I'll let you know how I get on.

 

[stiffyboy]

ok. I just booted from CDROM, pressed R to repair, didn't seem to do much then asked me to type EXIT in console to restart the computer. After that, no progress, still the same problem as before, gets to the "start windows normally etc." screen and restarts again.

so what's chkdsk?

(edit) - Never mind, I used my initiative and typed in chkdsk in the console. But... it seems to be stuck at 25%.

(edit2 - 21:02) - 29%. yay.

(edit3 - 21:06) - CHKDSK found one or more errors on the volume.
195350368 kilobytes total disk space.
17767448 kilobytes are available.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
48837592 total allocation units on disk.
4441862 allocation units available on disk.

C:\>/

 

[stiffyboy]

did fixboot and it booted up ok!!!

thanks so much to everyone who helped.

special cheers to split. your help was brilliant, the way you described "press any key to boot from CD" etc. was brilliant. cheers bud.

thanks again!!! cheers!!!

stiffyboy.

 

[stiffyboy]

It's really weird but woke up this morning, tried to boot the system and the exact same problem happend again... I had to boot from CD again and do chkdsk, fixboot before it worked again. In fact I'm using the system right now to post this.

I'm running virus, spyware scans at the mo. I also reviewed my start up utility thing (RUN > msconfig) because I messed around with it before, so now Windows starts normally. I think that might have been my problem.

I'll see what happens and report back if I have any more problems.

Cheers again for the chkdsk tip .

 

[stiffyboy]

hey, just to report back. ever since the last time i had to boot from cd, it seems to be ok. in fact on the last boot windows did an automatic CHKDSK, the one with a light blue background, windows logo etc. and ever since it seems to be ok.

and in reply to split, i haven't defragged this comp for ages! lol. so probably a good idea. and that TSR doesn't sound too good lol.

and to huddy, i'll see how it goes and i'll do that error checking thing some time soon.

thanks again guys.