WinXp Pro Won't Boot Up

Hello, I find myself once again at your mercy and wisdom. I was working on the internet, had closed the browser, opened quicken, attached a flash drive to a usb port, and got a bsod. Before I could write down the message, the machine shut down. Now when I power on the machine, the hard drive light blinks, the cd drive tries to do something, I can here it spinning, but I get nothing. I have an emergency boot disk, can't get it to read, I have my Win XP Pro cd, can't get it to read. Please help Sherrie

Hi punkinsmom,

If you can't get your XP CD to boot-up and your Hard-drive is making noises, it sound like your Hard-drive is kaput.
You will need a new one.

But before you go down that route, free hard-drive testing programs are supported by the hard-drive manufacturers themselves. Seagate, Hitachi, and Western Digital all make very popular testing programs.

However, "SeaTools for Windows" tests hard-drives no matter who the manufacturer is.

Download this ISO file- SeaTools for Windows.

How To Burn an ISO Image File to a CD, DVD

Run that disk. You will soon know if you need a new hard-drive.

Cheers,
Lee

I have an emergency boot disk, can't get it to read, I have my Win XP Pro cd, can't get it to read

Are you sure the boot sequence in the bios is set to the cdrom first and the hard drive second? If not you will not be able to boot to and cd you insert.

Do you have other USB memory devices connected to this machine?
(external HD, camera or media player, other USB flash drives)

If so, with the power off, disconnect the USB Memory device(s), USB Hub (external or internally additional USB ports that you may have installed).
(USB Keyboard, USB mouse are OK to leave. USB Printer may or may not be involved in the problem depending on the brand/model/features of your printer. Therefore, consider disconnecting any USB Printer if one exists)

As our Visiting Tech Rschaffer61 suggests, have a look in our BIOS Setup setting to assure the Boot Order is
CD/DVD
HD

If other devices are also listed in the Boot Order, such as Boot on Lan, Boot on USB, then if you have the option, disable those.

Try booting your machine again now.

Hello punkinsmom, You could try tapping the F8 key on your keyboard until the Advanced startup options menu appears, here you can select Disable automatic restart on system failure. If that works you should be able to see (and post) the error message from the blue screen.

I was finally able to get the cd drive to boot the disk with SeaTools for Windows. The short test results follow: Selected Drive Info Device 0 is ATA Device WD3200AAJS-65RYA0 WD-WMPAZ0599081 on generic PCI ATA. Max native address 0 Device is 48 Bit address-Number of LBAs 625142447 (320.073GB) This drive does not support Security Features SMART is Supported and Enabled SMART has not been tripped DST is supported Logging feature is supported POH or P0H (not sure which) Test Info Scanning for devices on generic PCI ATA (this is duplicated on two more lines) Detected 1 device Scan complete. I'm running a long test now. I guess this is a start. Sure am glad I have my data backed up in case I need a new hard drive. If I do have to go that route, what should I look for on the capatibility side. This computer is at least 6 yrs old and was running great until Friday when I started having the problems. I really don't have the funds to replace the whole unit (husband was unemployed for over two years until just recently, playing catch up now with our finances) so I would rather just replace the drive. That is if I have to. Thank you for coming to my aid. Sherrie (punkinsmom)

If you're asking what to look for in a new drive purely from a disk reliability view, I can recommend Enterprise class drives. Hitachi, Seagate, etc, these are great for long life.

Glad to hear your were able to make a SeaTools CD and run it. If your PC is 6yrs. old you may have an IDE Hard-drive, not Sata. IDE and Sata are the cable connections used to connect the hard-drive to your motherboard. IDE is a flat wide connection cable (usually cream or grey in colour) with a lot of pins in the connection ends. Sata is a thin flat cable (usually red but sometimes black) with a very simplified end connection. It will be obvious which you have. Luckily, hard-drives are cheap nowadays. Wait and see from the test if the hard-drive is the problem, but it sounds like it. Cheers, Lee

According to Western Digital: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=110 .The drive model WD3200AAJS is SATA type and 320GB.

Long test passed did ctrl-alt-del to reboot Windows splash screen came up checking file system on c: = NTFS stopped check disk since it passed 3 times prior computer just set on that screen and didn't go any further for over 15 mins I am now booting up my Windows XP Pro Disk since I can at least get to that point. I thought maybe I would try to repair the Windows installation but I'm not sure if that's my problem. Any thoughts?

EDIT- Missed your last post (I'm typing one-handed at the moment) so the HDD is OK and at least you can boot to your XP install CD so that is good news and as you have backed up your data, I'd go for a fresh install If your hard-drive is making noises though, it's due for a replacement so you might want to think about that first. ————————————————————————————————————————————————————- Any brand or GB size will work, but if you need a new one, it might be worth going for another brand (mostly very similar prices) considering the Western Digital might need replacing after only 6yrs. of home use. I have never had a hard drive problem and one PC I have one here has a 12yr.old hard drive in it and it's been flogged to death over the years but works perfectly. Hard-drive breakdowns used to be a fairly common event back in the day. But they build them far better nowadays and a breakdown should be very rare. Everyone has their preferences they swear by, but I have always used Seagate drives. Just make sure it is a Sata 3.5". not 2.5" ( for Laptops), that is all you have to worry about. Cheers, Lee

I'm re-installing now. One more question, is there something that I can purchase so that I don't have to reload all the software I had on that drive. My back-up is data only. Thanks for the help.

Unfortunately when you format and do a fresh install there is no way around the programs other then to reinstall.

Oh well, nothing ventured. I will be looking into a new hard drive though. Thanks again for all the help. You can close this thread.

Just a suggestion but what you might consider is making a clone of your C drive once everything is reinstalled and working. You can do this by creating a image of your drive using something like Acronis True Image.