Loopy PC

[plumerjr]

Today I checked out a friends PC who has been unable to boot onto his computer. It's a HP Media Center PC M7360N. I'm unsure whether this is a hardware or software problem so forgive me if it's in the wrong forum. When booting up it gets to the screen asking either to boot to Windows Media XP or to Recovery and then the PC restartsagain. When I tried to press F8 it gets to the screen asking whether to boot in safe mode, normal mode etc... it does the same thing and reboots in loop mode. I tried booting with my XP Pro disk and I enter chkdsk /r the PC freezes up . When I enter "chkdsk" it gives me an answer like "The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems" at which point I said "uh-ooh". I checked out the drive with some utilities from my "UBCD" and found no problems. My friend who bought this from"Best Buy" over a year ago was unsure if he ever got some sort of "Recovery disk" with the PC. Sorry I don't have any more hard data the hardware because I was unable to boot up I was unable to tell what exactly it was made up of. Any helpful hints or suggestions would be greatly appreciated

[plumerjr]

Additional info:

When I ran a chkdsk /F I came across and error message like this:

Technical information:

*** STOP: 0x00000024 (0x00190203, 0x89102528, 0xC0000102, 0x00000000)

Also the PC was unequipped with a floppy drive so I was unable to boot using my XP setup boot disks. I remember during the tests it had a 320gb drive(one partition was 310 the other I believe was a recovery partition was 10gb). I just thought I'd add this if it helps in troubleshooting.

[glc]

When you are on the F8 screen, choose "disable restart on error" and it will bluescreen instead of reboot. The words on the bluescreen are your clues.

HP does not provide recovery media, it's on the hard drive in a hidden recovery partition. The user needs to make their own media, if your friend never did it, it's might be too late now. There's an article on HP's support site that tells you how to do a system recovery at bootup, you can try that.

EDIT: Yeah, a stop 24 is a NTFS file system error - the hard drive is scrambled. Use memtest86+ on the UBCD and test the ram - then run the full hard drive diags for the brand drive that's in there.

[plumerjr]

Thank you for the info I will go and checkout the HP site now.

[plumerjr]

I did check out Hp it did give info on how to recover it. I'll have to give it a try. They also have an option of purchasing a CD. Anyone know (an educated guess is fine) how much these CD's are? I couldn't find out without the system serial number(I didn't take PC home). Just so I could give my friend a ballpark figure if it comes to that. It's only a last resort at this point.Thank you.

[glc]

I think it's about 30 bucks.