Uh Oh, Windows problems need suggestions before I...

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kill4killin

Gawd
Joined
Jul 3, 2006
Messages
842
throw my computer out the window!

It all started today when my computers video card started doing some weird funky shit. Every so often the screen would freeze and I had to right click the mouse to get it to refresh the screen. So I re-installed the video drivers to see if that would fix it. It made it worse, now it froze any time i moved the mouse and would refresh by turning on and off the monitor every 5 seconds. I uninstalled the drivers and re-installed the old drivers thinking that it would fix or at least get it back to the old problem...Installer was corrupt on old driver. So I go to re-download the file. Every single driver I download is corrupt. I realize that if I download the file to a different hard drive it is not corrupt...ok great my hard drive is having a bad day, so what, we can work with this. I re-install the drivers and reboot, after I reboot windows gives me about 10 windows telling me that some file in the registry was corrupt but was able to be restored with a backup. I also notice that the system did not realize that my drivers were installed, even though they appear to be installed on the drive and in the add/remove programs window, wtf!

I go to repair my windows installation thinking that, yea its been a while, maybe some stuff has corrupted itself and needs to be re-installed. The windows install fails at the end due to some sort of system failure or something that is preventing it from working.

I select a different unused partition on that same drive. Installation is finished without a problem and then I reboot. Posts perfectly fine and then goes to a black screen and gets stuck...I hit the power button and I don't have to hold it down. This is a sign that it never completed the post stage or that windows was never even attempted to start loading...

WTF is wrong with this thing. Can someone please help me. Normally I can figure this sort of stuff out, but its like multiple things have just one after another put me in a worse situation...HELP
 
rofl just throw it out the window... sorry dude :confused:

edit: sounds like bad harddrive causing corrupt files and/or bad video card


try removing video drivers with driver cleaner pro link
 
Is that the system in your sig? Try setting all the hardware to non-overclocked specs...reset the CMOS if you have to..

Sounds like something's on the fritz.... try getting it down to what you know works too..

Last time this happened to me...my mobo died. Look for leaking or bulging capacitors. :eek:
 
Ok, I will try all of the suggested ideas above when I get off work.

Thank you mods for moving this. I was not quite sure where to put it, thank you for helping me with that.

I'm pretty sure the video card is ok since it will display the post without problems. The only thing that I changed with the system right before this happened was that for the longest time I was running my gfx card in slot 2 because a had a passive NB cooler that was in the way of my card fitting in slot 1. After that I replaced the jumpers back to non-SLI mode so that I could utilize the full bandwidth of the card.

I think it has something to do with now haveing 2 versions of WinXP on the same drive and the bootloader or something like that.

The other thing I was going to try was going in and manually editing boot.ini to just see the new version of windows that is on there since I know for a fact the other one is beyond repair. I just need to grab a few files off of it and make a list of all the installed programs before I delete it. If it comes down to it, I will break out the live linux CD and do it that way, but I really would rather not have to if it can be avoided as those CDs take forever to boot and I'm impatient.

::EDIT::
DarthWombaT: I have to ask you...how do you survive with a 200mhz machine...are you running windows or linux?
 
kill4killin said:
I'm pretty sure the video card is ok since it will display the post without problems.
Click to expand...

That really doesn't prove much more than the base VGA section of the video card works. I've seen cards that POST just fine, but then fail in any sort of graphics mode, either 2D or 3D.
 
Ok, well I know now that it is not the graphics card because I'm on the computer right now booted onto a knoppix live cd.

It looks like it may be a problem with my boot.ini It appears that both partitions on the boot drive have a boot.ini file on them. However, in Knoppix I am unable to delete the boot.ini file from the old one. Is there someway I can either get rid of the other boot.ini file or somehow null and void it so that it does not work. The other thing I was considering doing was just screwing it all and installing linux on the partition that I just attempted to install XP on again to see if Grub or Lilo will allow me to boot into the original XP install. The only risk with that is if that fails then there is no way to get back my old boot loader since the repair function does not work with the old install.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can save some of the stuff on my hard drive? There isn't much besides my firefox bookmarks and one folder worth of pictures that I want to save. If someone could direct me to the location of the firefox bookmarks then I would not need to worry about saving this partition and I can just re-install completely over it.
 
I'm not sure how you ended up with two boot.ini files but the only one that should have any effect on how the PC boots up is the one on the partition that is marked active. The other one on the other partition doesn't get read. Sounds like you have a bad harddrive and or bad ram. You can test the ram with memtest, a free download just google it. If you go to the drive manufacturers web sight you should be able to download a free utility to test your harddrive for errors.
 
go into xp recovery console from xp cd and try fixmbr and fixboot?
 
kill4killin said:
::EDIT::

Nevermind, problem solved, thank you all for your help.
Click to expand...

And the answer was.....???

It doesn't help anyone if you don't explain how you resolved the problem.
 
lol o, I ended up just using knoppix to go in and read my disk that had the stuff I wanted to save on it. Since it wasn't much stuff I just plugged in my jump drive and thanks to knoppix's ability to detect hot plug USB devices, just transfered the few things I cared about onto my jump drive and then reformatted both drives and installed winxp on one and I plan to use the other partition as my Ubuntu linux drive. Then it was just the matter of getting everything re-installed which was far harder then I had expected. My video card drivers did not want to install using the nvidia driver installer so I had to go in and manually specify a driver the windows way. Then my TV card refused to work. So I had to do the same for it. It seems like for some reason my computer is incapable of using 3rd party driver installers to install new hardware...its wierd
 
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