Need help, computer quit booting

[Cid]

Hello. I am looking for some help/advice. My computer quit booting yesterday and I frankly haven’t got a clue as to what to do. And I really really do not want to format c:. =(

This is what happened: I build my computer in May time frame. Initially I got a bad stick of ram from Corsair. Had them replace it and they sent me another bad stick. I was running the PC with the bad stick of ram in it for a little while and was starting to lock up/blue screen of death too much that I finally yanked it out and put a good stick of non-Corsair ram in. I noticed afterward that it was taking forever to boot to windows. Now I usually do not sit around and wait on the computer to boot, but it had been booting really quickly in the past. So this may or may not be related to my ram replacement. But I continued locking up and still blue screen of death-ing even after putting in the good ram. Finally yesterday morning, I booted it up went in and checked my email. Everything seemed fine. I left it sit after reading the email and came back to it an hour later to find it locked up again. I hit reset and this time I went through the usual boot options – it finds my video card, my ram, my drives, etc – then when it came time to load Windows, it went to a black blank screen and stopped. That’s it. And that’s all it’s been doing since.

I tried re-seating the stick of ram, putting the bad stick of Corsair ram back into it, that made no difference. I’m not sure if the ram is related to the problem or not. I’m leaning towards no at this point. I cannot get in in Safe Mode, I cannot load Windows normally, I can’t load Safe Mode with the command prompt, can’t go back to a previous working version, nothing. So I dug out my Windows installation disk thinking perhaps I can get into the recovery utility, or if all else fails, to reinstall Windows over the top of what I have. Load the disk into the CD ROM, boot to it. Now when you boot to the install disk it goes through and loads a bunch of files before you can really do anything with it. After the initial loading it gets to a point where “setup is loading Windows” and after that you can get into the recovery console, install Windows, etc. But when I got to the “setup is loading Windows” everything stopped there! The disk stops spinning, the hard drive stops, bam, nothing. No errors, nothing. So I cannot get into the recovery console, cannot even get into load Windows at this point.

Don’t know if this is at all significant or not, but will mention it for completeness. We’ve had a bunch of storms lately and twice now the power has flashed and the computer went down. I do have it running through a surge supressor. I noticed then at some point afterwards that my computer thought it was an Athlon XP 1500+ when it reality it is a Athlon XP 2700+. I went into BIOS and changed my FSB back to 166 from 100 and it was able to figure out what it really is.

Also this weekend, I did some computer housekeeping. I have Norton Utilities loaded and it runs automatically on Friday evening (if I’m not there to stop it) and it ran on Friday and I told it to clean up whatever it found. Then Sunday, I ran a disk defrag, full system virus scan and ran an Ad Aware scan moving about 29 “tracking cookies” to quarantine.

I read about the lastest virus and it doesn’t really sound like I have that. I am getting the impression from what I have read that it does not do this much damage.. And I’m using the firewall in Windows. I really have any idea at this point if the problem is hardware or software related..

I really do not know what to do! If anyone has some suggestions, ideas, anything I would really appreciate it!! =)

Computer specs:
AMD Athlon XP 2700+
MSI Motherboard K7N2
512MB DDR Ram (Corsair ram is at 400MHz and the other stick I’m using is 333MHz)
Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti 4600 video card
Sound Blaster Audigy 2
Western Digital 120GB 7200RPM Hard Drive
Windows XP Professional

Thank you so much!
-Cid

[eldon]

Could be a bad surge protector,if surges hit the protector wont last long,also I had some of the same symptoms once and it turned out to be a bad processor.may want to check the inside of your rig and make sure everything is seated properly,and also check your cables.

[Force Flow]

Welcome to PCMech, Cid!

What's the CPU temp?

[Cid]

Comp temp ranges around 40 degrees C. I am using the fan that came with the processor on the chip.

[morriswindgate]

It sounds like the NOrton Utilities has screwed up some of the files. The only product that you want to run from Norton is the Anti-Virus. Speed Disk and Disk Doctor are known to screw up file system.
You may have to run the Repair console by booting from your XP CD.

[Cid]

Really? I didn't know that about Norton. yikes......

Part of the problem is that I cannot get to the Repair console on my XP disk. When I get to the point on the disk where "setup is loading Windows", I feeze up. I can't get far enough into the process on the disk to get to the Repair Console. =(