Help,
I was sitting here in my office and all of a sudden my backup computer started cycling on and off. It powers up to the Windows XP startup screen and then restarts. It doesnt go past the black windows XP startup screen. Any ideas on whats going on?
Steve
HELP!!!!!! Dell Issues
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firemed9
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HELP!!!!!! Dell Issues
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"Train as if your life depends on it, because it does."
No Trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again
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thebigphish
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if it's crashing right after the XP-logo-on-black-backround screen, chances are it is a hardware fault, as most of the work that happens behind that screen is involved with the Hardware Abstraction Layer & things such as driver population...
I'd say to try to safe-mode-it once to see if that yeilded any luck (hoping for a driver failure), and if that did not work i would start pulling extra hardware peripherals out of the system to see if that helps (soundcard, SCSI boards, TV tuner cards, and the like).
Its times like this that geeks revel in the Xp recovery Console...i just started using it, and now i love it.
If you can get it to safemode, or you can get it to bootlog...that will tell you what is failing, and how it is failing and why...
good luck
I'd say to try to safe-mode-it once to see if that yeilded any luck (hoping for a driver failure), and if that did not work i would start pulling extra hardware peripherals out of the system to see if that helps (soundcard, SCSI boards, TV tuner cards, and the like).
Its times like this that geeks revel in the Xp recovery Console...i just started using it, and now i love it.
If you can get it to safemode, or you can get it to bootlog...that will tell you what is failing, and how it is failing and why...
good luck
Yep, he's right, that is usually due to a hardware fault, or just a bad driver can cause it. I saw this for weeks when the new windows update started providing driver updates and everyone was downloading and installing them. Get one bad or wrong driver in there and it will happen.
Boot up in safe mode and see if you can get all the way to the desktop and running first of all. Then you have plenty of options, you can just run Restore and roll it back a day or so, or you can do some digging and find out what the error was if it was actually logged correctly, i had one that wasn't logging any errors.
Also, if you right click on My Computer and select Properties, then go to the Advanced tab and click on settings by Startup and Recovery, the third Settings button, then uncheck the box about three quarters of the way down, Automatically Restart, this will keep the computer from rebooting when the errors occur and will instead show you the BSOD, blue screen of death, which will have details on the error that is crashing the system. It will show the actual error message and what file name is involved, then a quick search on the net will tell you what that file belongs to. I have had to do this numerous times when drivers were messed up on a system. Once you find out which piece of hardware it belongs to, as long as it isn't the video card or onboard video, you can pull that piece of hardware out and then boot up the system normally and see if all is well. If it is then just uninstall the drivers for that device and start over with installing it using the correct drivers.
If it happens to be a video driver problem then boot up in safe mode, go to device manage, select the video adapter in the list and roll back to the previous driver if available. IF not then right click on the video adapter in the list and click uninstall, it will warn about removing the device from the system, click ok, then it will ask to reboot, say yes. It will reboot and redetect the video card and give you the driver wizard to start over and install a new driver.
If the device is an onboard item, such as onboard sound, just go in the bios and disable it, the same as physically removing it, so you can reboot and see if that was the hardware causing the problem.
Boot up in safe mode and see if you can get all the way to the desktop and running first of all. Then you have plenty of options, you can just run Restore and roll it back a day or so, or you can do some digging and find out what the error was if it was actually logged correctly, i had one that wasn't logging any errors.
Also, if you right click on My Computer and select Properties, then go to the Advanced tab and click on settings by Startup and Recovery, the third Settings button, then uncheck the box about three quarters of the way down, Automatically Restart, this will keep the computer from rebooting when the errors occur and will instead show you the BSOD, blue screen of death, which will have details on the error that is crashing the system. It will show the actual error message and what file name is involved, then a quick search on the net will tell you what that file belongs to. I have had to do this numerous times when drivers were messed up on a system. Once you find out which piece of hardware it belongs to, as long as it isn't the video card or onboard video, you can pull that piece of hardware out and then boot up the system normally and see if all is well. If it is then just uninstall the drivers for that device and start over with installing it using the correct drivers.
If it happens to be a video driver problem then boot up in safe mode, go to device manage, select the video adapter in the list and roll back to the previous driver if available. IF not then right click on the video adapter in the list and click uninstall, it will warn about removing the device from the system, click ok, then it will ask to reboot, say yes. It will reboot and redetect the video card and give you the driver wizard to start over and install a new driver.
If the device is an onboard item, such as onboard sound, just go in the bios and disable it, the same as physically removing it, so you can reboot and see if that was the hardware causing the problem.
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