PC boot problem

[Northy]

Hi guys,

I've just moved my desktop to a new case and now it won't boot properly.

It gets to the black xp screen, with blue bar along bottom, then just as it should boot to windows it craps out and restarts :(

Any ideas? This should have been a quick easy job :(

Cheers,

G

[Southwell]

Did you change the power supply with the case? If so chances are it doesn't have the power of your old one and therefore power cycles.

[Northy]

I didn't at first, but have changed it now and it still does it :(

G

[Southwell]

You grounded the motherboard properly? Not just mounted it to the chassis? You normally get little bronze nipples with them, or 'stand up's' from the case, im sure you have otherwise it wouldnt fit properly.

You changed anything else at all?

[jimmy]

Try taking (CAREFULLY) some of your memory out maybe - that can cause the system to hang on boot, at least in my experience, if it's dodgy. I managed to trace mine to one bad dimm, which I got exchanged and it was fine.
Could have got damaged during the move is all.:confused:

[DCM]

It is going past the boot screen and POST, so, he has tried taking out the wifi card and still did it, I would think it is either that the windows XP install is now confused and needs a repair doing to it, or the disk has had a corruption so needs scan disk doing

[dave g]

i trust you earthed yourself first graham before touching any of the internals?

you can damage the motherboard and memory from static without having known or felt you have done so..

i would say a memory problem or hard drive is corrupted(unlikey if alll you have done is move it.)

dave

[Northy]

i trust you earthed yourself first graham before touching any of the internals?

:rolleyes:

G

[dave g]

i would remove anything like sound card,lan card etc thats not crucial to boot up,if one of those is causing grief it could be crapping out as windows loads the device drivers for it.

might be worth clearing the cmos too while your at it.

dave

[Northy]

The only things left plugged in now are the moterboard to the power supply and hard drive :(

Still craps out :(

G

[dave g]

have you reseated the cpu and fan?
reseated the memory and graphics card.

if the cpu isnt seated right it can overheat very quickly causing a thermal shutdown.

failing that,stick the windows cd in the dvd drive,if its xp,set bios to boot from cd and do a repair,you wont lose any data.

dave

[Northy]

Never touche cpu and fan in the move, but will try re-seating them. Have tried re-seating the graphics card.

If that doesn't help, I'll do a repair. :(

G

[dave g]

only take 20-30 mins for a full repair graham depending on your pc setup.

dave

[Northy]

Tomorrow night now, i've had enough of it for tonight. It was going to be one of those 15 min jobs....... :o

I should have just gone outside and spoken to the man in the moon about getting some more cheese :D :D :D

G

[dave g]

maybe you dropped some cheddar under the motherboard when installing it ?

dave

[baD]

you have trying to boot in 'Safe Mode' haven't you ? :wtf:

[MATTY]

I had similar problem with a pc i had built. Faulty reset switch ! little bugger took me 2 hours to find it :D

[Richard Lowe]

Keep tapping F8 just before you would normally get the Windows loading screen to bring up the boot menu. Assuming you have SP2 installed you should have an option that says 'disable automatic restart on boot failure' or something like that.
Select it and it should start booting as normal, when it gets to the point where it would restart it should stop on a blue screen with an error on. If it says 'unmountable boot volume' anywhere on it it's a 2 minute fix that doesn't need a full repair install doing.

Let us know what the stop screen says ;)

[Northy]

I've done as Rich has suggested and here is what it says:

STOP: c0000218 {Registry File Failure}
The registry cannot load the hive (file):
\SystemRoot\System32\Config\SOFTWARE
or its log or alternate.
It is corrupt, absent, or not writable.

Beginning dump of physical memory
Physical memory dump complete.
Contact your ststem administrator or technical support group for further
assistance.


HELP!!!! :o :o :o

G

[burgie]

is it a new motherboard or the old one in a new case?

if it's a new motherboard with the XP installation for the old motherboard, therein lies your problem apparently - as i understand it, XP does not "transfer" between motherboards, a new installation is required.

[Northy]

Its all the old componets just in a new case :confused: I don't know why it didn't work, its a simple job :(

G

[dave g]

graham you could have done a reinstall over the top of the old one by the time it takes to get a reply..and you wont lose any data.

sounds like its the xp bootup config file thats gone then..just do a reinstall,cant hurt anything.

[Northy]

So is that my only alternative? :confused:

G

[jcb]

Sounds like the problem I am having with mine too. Our computer no longer recognises the hard drive, and when we put a new hard drive in there is still the same problem. We can't reinstall XP even though we have the proper disk and no one really seems to know whats up with it :confused:

Think its going to be an insurance to get a new PC as that seems easier ;)

[Richard Lowe]

The registry's corrupted there G by the sounds of it, are you able to boot into safe mode and do the system restore? That will use a backed up copy of the registry. Or as Dave has suggested do a repair install and this will overwrite the windows system files.

[Fiddybux]

This does sound like a corrupted registry...which could have happened when the machine reset itself with the drive spinning, i.e. the initial cause of the reset may have been hardware related which in turn fragged a couple of sectors on your hard disk and now the reg is corrupt.

Looks like you will have to do a repair job using the XP cd. Hopefully this will work.

If not, if the HD is screwed and you have another one spare, pop the spare in and reinstall XP to the spare HD and copy all your important stuff over. Then reinstall fresh on your original HD (after fully formatting it) and copy your stuff back.

Failing that, try using a Live DVD of Ubuntu or Fedora Core 7 (both Linux). You can google for these. You will need to use a different computer to download and burn these disk images, but basically when done they will boot into a complete OS straight from CD/DVD.

You should then be able to read and write to/from your windows partitions, so you may find you can save all of your important data to an external firewire drive or something.

In any case, when / if you get your stuff back make sure you keep backups of everything that is important to you. I've learned this lesson the hard way so many times now! :(

Hope this helps.