Windows XP Pro won't finish booting

I've got a Windows XP machine which, for some unknown reason, has suddenly stopped booting up into Windows. If you try enough times, it will, eventually, boot into Windows, but you'll spend half the day trying that. It gets as far as AGP440.sys and then immediately reboots. No blue screen, just an instant reboot. I've tried different RAM (stored RAM that was pulled from another machine when upgrading the RAM) and I've tried a bigger, fatter power supply than the wimpy 250 watt thing that HP installed. Nothing has worked so far. Any suggestions??? About the only thing I haven't checked is the motherboard and the hard drive. I'm about to see if I can get a boot disk that'll check the hard drive and see if it's failing or something.

Hello John, We apologise for the delay in your HJT log being answered, the Malware folk are really busy and it is also holiday time for some of the volunteers. We cannot help you here until you are cleared of Malware now you have posted your log. I see you have posted in the correct forum as you have been waiting more than 5 days, so hopefully one of the Malware fighters will pick up your log ASAP. I can only advise you not to answer your own log and be still more patient for the log to be attended to. kind regards,

Well, first of all, this is a separate issue… different machine. Second, TomK has said that he won't help as I'm the IT manager (pretty much the whole department, but that's neither here nor there.) I'd really appreciate some help.

Hi

You could always try boot it from a Ubuntu Live CD.
Ubuntu Live CD

Regards Abydos

Hi

You could always try boot it from a Ubuntu Live CD.
Ubuntu Live CD

Regards Abydos

Thanks… I'm quite familiar with Ubuntu and other linux distributions. Actually, I run Fedora 10 at home.

Thanks to a local geek mailing list, I was able to load the recovery console and run a chkdsk and that found and fixed some errors, so problem solved. Sorry to bother you guys for something like that. I've never really had to use the recovery console, so I'm not familiar with it.

Hi again Good you got it fixed, and no, its no bother at all Never tried Fedora. Gnome and Ubuntu being the Linux distributions I have sniffed at. Planning on getting a cheap laptop running Ubuntu so I can learn my way around it properly That CHKDSK fixed it, might point to bad sectors being the culprit. Something for you to investigate. The CHKDSK log should be located in the Winlogon service folder (I think) Otherwise it should be retrieveable from the eventviewer around the time of of the error. regards Abydos

Yeah… I had it run a scandisk from within Windows after I got it to boot up and it found a few bad sectors. I'll see about getting a new hard drive for it, or maybe even upgrading the user to a new machine (although a HDD would be cheaper. Wondering if anyone here has ever used G4L (Ghost 4 Linux) to copy a Windows install to a new hard drive? Theoretically it should work, but I'm somewhat concerned about the MBR, etc not getting copied. Oh, well… only one way to find out. :-)