XP Pro Repair

[cmichael258]

Last night I attempted to walk my brother, who lives in another state, through a Windows XP Pro repair. When he booted up with the CD installed (legit version, used once to build this computer), it booted into Windows. I then walked him through accessing the BIOS and changed the boot order to CD ROM 1st, saved and exited. He rebooted and Windows still loaded. I thought he perhaps missed a step in changing the boot order so we went back into the setup and the CD ROM did show as 1st boot device. Any thoughts as to why it won't boot to the disk? The MB is an ABIT KV7. The computer has been up and running well for the past 3 years, until he attempted to delete some installed programs.
Thanks!

ANTEC SLK2650 Super Mid Tower Case w/Antec 350W PSU
ABIT KV7 MOTHERBOARD
Samsung 1GB PC3200 DDR Memory
AMD Athlon XP 2600+ Barton CPU
nVIDIA GeForce FX5600 Video Card 128MB 8X AGP
MAXTOR 80GB HARD DRIVE ATA/133 EIDE 8MB 7200RPM
52x SONY CDRW CD-R/RW Burner
TOSHIBA DVD ROM SD-M1202 IDE DRIVE
3.5 in. Panasonic 1.44MB Floppy Drive

[EzyStvy]

Does the cd drive show up in the BIOS?

Even if it does, it could be dirty and or non functional.

[shadowpr]

It looks like you have two drives, a dvd and cd drive. Did you try both?

[cmichael258]

Originally Posted by shadowpr It looks like you have two drives, a dvd and cd drive. Did you try both?

Yes...tried both just in case it was recognizing the DVD drive. Same results. I also had him go to my cpmputer and click on the CD Rom drive and the XP Pro files showed up. I figured that the CD Rom drive was working in order to show the XP Pro files.

[glc]

Is he watching the screen carefully - like for a prompt that says "press any key to boot to CD"?

[cmichael258]

Originally Posted by glc Is he watching the screen carefully - like for a prompt that says "press any key to boot to CD"?

Good question glc; I'll check on that and let everyone know. I know from past experience that hitting a key at the wrong time can take you in a completely different direction.

[cmichael258]

Well, he was fianlly able to get it to boot to the CD ROM drive by hitting a key at the right time, and we did a repair. Unfortunately, shortly thereafter, the computer froze while we were checking on some settings. Had him reboot and checked Device Manager to see that all hardware was working properly. Then checked Task Manager to check system processes as he said the cursor kept changing back and forth between arrow and hour glass. He said that update.exe was running in the background. This might explain an issue he mentioned earlier....that windows would always give him a message when he was shutting down that it would install updates and then shut down. He said this happened everytime he shut down and he didn't think anything was being installed.

Any recommendations short of doing a reinstall?

As always, appreciate your time and suggestions.

[shadowpr]

Did you have him run windows update and make sure it's fully updated?

[cmichael258]

Originally Posted by shadowpr Did you have him run windows update and make sure it's fully updated?

Yes...that was the 1st thing we did after the repair. The freezing began just after doing the updates and restart.

Would you recommend going to add/remove and uninstalling, then reinstalling all updates?

[shadowpr]

Might be quicker to just do a whole new install depending on how many updates there were.

[cmichael258]

Originally Posted by shadowpr Might be quicker to just do a whole new install depending on how many updates there were.

That's what I am going to suggest. He doesn't have much patience when it comes to diagnosing and fixing problems with his computer.

Thanks for your help!