Can't Boot Up!

All: I'm in a real panic here. The PC that my wife uses for most of her stuff–and for all our email–won't boot up. Apparently after an automatic update from Microsoft, I lost use of a USB 2.0 card I installed in the machine. I tried reinstalling the drivers, and then started having trouble rebooting the machine. I finally got it to come back up, but never really got the USB 2.0 card working–It gave me a BSD with a parity error message. I then got it to restart (after 5-10 attempts) and left it alone. Today I was trying to do some spreadsheet work, reading files from a thumb drive I had hoopked into one of the two "legacy" USB ports, and couldn't load the data. I decided to try and reboot gain. Big mistake–the thing won't come back up. I can't even get the memory check to start or display on the screen–I can't get anything to show on the screen. It won't get off standby. If I power-cycle it,I get nothing, and it goes to standby in about 10 seconds after being turned back on. I don't know if it's a virus, corrupted operating system, dying (or dead) hard drive, dead motherboard, or whatever. My wife won't be much help on this. I'm using the other machine we use at home to sent this message. Both machines are tied to a LAN that's connected to a cable modem. Both machines run XP–only I have Automatic Updates turned off on this machine. HELP!!!! –Tom vonHatten

Hi There

Have you tried remove the USB 2.0 card and then reboot?


Parity errors can occur if the machine is writing to the wrong
memory on boot. Which most of the times are fixable via the
BIOS or removing the hardware piece giving the fault, which in
your case, is most likely the USB card.

Can you access BIOS?

Keep tapping DEL(ETE) key at BIOS screen. On some Motherboards
the F1 or F2 or ESC is being used (Altho rarely)

I can't get anything to show on the screen.

Nothing at all? Not even the BIOS screen? If no is the answer to this, please ignore
the BIOS request above.

Keep us posted.

Regards

I don't know if I could get to the BIOS screen or not–I couldn't see the screen. Anyway, I powered completely down (unplugged the power cord from the PC), waited a few minutes, and reconnected it. I didn't get any screen again, and went on to start working on things using the other PC. I looked up about 40 minutes later, and found that the machine was booting up, and I saw the Win XP Welcome" screen. That means a 3-5 minute boot up took about 40 minutes to complete. I can't picture the USB 2.0 card, no matter what its condition, causing the boot up to be this slow. –TvH

I can't picture the USB 2.0 card, no matter what its condition, causing the boot up to be this slow.

Seeing that your troubles began when updating drivers for that unit, it would be the first
place I would look. Removing the card will render the drivers inoperative. This is purely
a troubleshooting step, in order to see what is causing the problems.

So your machine is on now i take it?

regards

I'm sorry–I'm not explaining this very well. I was told by my wife that the PC in question "locked up" for a few hours one day, came back just as suddenly, and I found that I didn't have any use of the USB 2.0 card after that:. I tried to reload the drivers, had trouble rebooting, got the NMI parity error with the BSOD, and then again had trouble rebooting from that. At that point, the reboot took about 10 minutes and several attempts. The last time, it took over half an hour to reboot–exactly how long, I don't know because I had no screen display of anything for at least 10 minutes. The real problem here is that I'm leaving the house today and will be out of town for a little over a month, and won't be able to try anyting on the machine immediately.. My wife won't be able to follow up for several weeks, either…and won't risk losing it to any kind of reboot attempts until I get back since she has several projects on it that she needs to get done in the next two weeks. The PC IS up, and IS working, but the problem isn't solved. I can't do anything about it for a month. My wife is afraid to do anything about it, and since it's up and running and as long as she can do what she wishes to do, that's good enough for now. When I get back in a month, or if the thing totally craps out again, I'll retart this thread. If you have any other suggestions on things to check into that don't require any kind of machine shutdown or reboot, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks so far–maybe I'll see you in a month. –Tom vonHatten

Hi I understand. I'll investigate some avenues. How confident / experienced is your wife around computer's? Would she be able to follow simple thorough guiding? I can cut info and troubleshooting down to explain every step of the way if needed, no problem with that in my end. If you are more confident, that you should do this yourself, you just post into this thread again. I'll keep it on email notice. Regards

Abydos: I'm finally back at this problem. While I was gone, the machine had slowed up so much that my wife thought she couldn't use MS Word at all, as it was taking minutes to load a document, as well as minutes for Word itself to load and show up on the screen. I did a reboot, and got 4-5 resource conflicts. I'd continue the boot up, and would get into XP, only to be shown a BSOD indicating a "NMI Parity Error". I shut things down completely, removed the 5-port USB 2.0 adapter card (D-Link DU-520), and rebooted. System performance was much improved. I intend on reinstalling the DU-520 drivers from the CD that came with the card, and reinstalling the card to see what it will do. It had worked just fine until earlier this year, and I don't know why it screwed up–but it's obvious that the card is related to the problem, either as the source of the trouble or a symptom of another malady. Thanks for waiting this so long regarding this –TvH

Hi , I'm glad to hear the position has improved. Now is the time to check that your backup/archive/copy of all the data and material on your computer that is important to you, is 100% accurate, up to date, and reproducible , and has been stored safely on removable media, then in the event of further trouble you will be prepared! Regards paws