Won't boot

[witness]

I turned off our computers Friday night before the storms came thru and mine rebooted fine, but my wife's won't. It's XP home. I tried restore and that didn't work. It will boot to safe mode so did that and scanned for bad sectors and that didn't help either so I used the xp disk to try to repair...I tried fixmbr and fixboot and that didn't help either. So now I don't know what to do. What it's doing is...it will get to the black xp screen with the little green lights and then go all the way back like you hit the reset switch. It was on a surge protector and my computer was in the same office and mine is fine as is all of our other electronics. any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
DD

[glc]

Boot it to safe mode and turn off restart on error.

Control panel, system, advanced, startup and recovery.

Then see if it bluescreens instead of rebooting - and read what the blusescreen says.

[witness]

I got it to blue screen, but I don't understand what it's trying to tell me...

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

Then at the bottom...

(STOP: 0x00000001, 0x00000003, 0x00000005, 0x00000000, 0xF848DD72)

(IdeChnDrsys- Address F848DD72 base at F8489000, Datestamp 3d99eaC3)

Sounds kinda like an IRQ conflict to me, but I really don't have a clue.

Thanks!!
DD

[flanzig1]

May want to go into device manager and see if any problems with modems or nic. Even with the computer turned off, still can get surges through phone lines and cable to the computer.

[witness]

Went to device mgr and everything looks ok. There is just a ? by "other devices, USB controller" but I'm pretty sure it has always been there.

I also went back to restore and tried an earlier restore point and that didn't help either.

I really need to get this thing fixed, because AutoCAD won't run and we need to get back to work tomorrow. Otherwise she'll be stuck working off a laptop and the mouse keeps freezing up on it, and that's a real pain in the butt.

Thanks!!
DD

[pam123]

Two things come to mind.
The first is check the memory.
Run one stick at a time and use memtest : http://www.memtest86.com/
The second is that power surges are random, what didn't harm your computer could have hit your wife's.
If the memory passes the test run a an HDD diagnostic, get it from the drive manufacturer's web site.
I think if something had zapped your modem/ethernet card, depending on what you're using, you'd see the warning in Device Manager.
If it still turns up clean then do a full repair, not the repair console you want to do the equivalent of reinstalling XP over the top of itself and do that you have to go all the way to install where XP will give you the option of a full install or a repair. You will need a proper XP cd for this, not a restore cd.
This shouldn't hurt the data but you will have to reinstall all the updates and drivers.

[witness]

Thanks Pam, good advice and I will do. I should have thought of the memory thing, but it just didn't come to mind

One question though...about doing a "Full Repair" (and I do have the origional xp disc, I build all of our computers myself and buy new software for each one, been doing that since 1996) I thought, and have experianced, if you reinstall xp you loose all data on that HD or partition, even if you don't reformat. Unlike the old days of 3.1 or 95 when you could just reinstall on top of the old OS and with a few minor adjustments have all of your stuff back. Could you explain how to do this with xp...BTW We are using the "home" version and SP2 is installed, but I don't think that particular computer has been updated in a while.

Thanks Much!!
DD

[pam123]

This is from Tips and Tricks and is a full description of the process of repairing XP and yes it is an over the top install and one XP handles well : http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=151522

[witness]

Well, I dn'ld the mem test and that went ok, so I went ahead and did the full repair and it worked beautifully. Now I don't quite understand why I had never noticed that you could do that before now...anyway everything seems to work...except the modem! It may have gotten zapped...I mess around with it a little more later before I break down and buy a new one.

Thanks!!
DD

[pam123]

So it was the modem that took the hit.
I thought about it but expected to see it in Device Manager, should have remembered that it doesn't always work that way.
Thanks for the follow-up, it's necessary.