Windows XP wont boot!

[eSDee]

One of my colleagues sent me this email, about his Windows XP box not being able to boot. I told him that I would pass it on, and see if the gurus here can help:

I had an XP machine that was being a bit flaky so I defragged it and then
flagged it to run disk check on restart. No errors were reported during the
scan. However, instead of starting the OS, it hung displaying the scan
completed window. The "three finger salute" will not restart, only the
hardware reset button. Alas, back into disk check.

The machine will start in recovery mode so I believe a file (or perhaps the
registry) is probably the root of the problem Any suggestions on where to
go before I spend money talking to M$?


Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

[ray]

If your friend had installed any new programs, made any changes to network settings prior to this, then he should reverse those changes to see if that solves the problem. If not...

have him reboot the computer in safe mode with networking options enabled, and then download the latest Windows Updates if he hasn't already done so. He should also download both Adaware 6.0 and Spybot and run those programs to ensure there's no crappy spyware slowing his system down at bootup.

Let us know how it goes!

[GilbertsGrape]

is it a Gateway e-3400 box if so i have had like 6 boxes do this same thing and the problem was soemthing on the Mother Board went bad or the Riser card went bad about 1/2 and 1/2. if it is the Mother board you can usuealy look at the board and see a burnt or brownish spot or a blown resistor or somthing to hat effect.

if you get a series of beeps when starting it could be a memory problem.


I have like alot of these e-3400 seriese so to check to see if it is software or hardware i just swap out HD's.

Grape

[LPMiller]

It's completely crashing on scan disc, and constantly doing it over again?

Boot up with partition magic and check the disk. Also, in safe mode run a restore to before he asked the disc to be checked - I think that will cancel out the check disk. A repair install would do that too, as it would delete the entry telling windows to run scandisk.

[eSDee]

Thanks everyone for your advice. DarkFury and Grape, as far as I know the computer doesn't beep. I am going to suggest that he try to go back to a restore point first, and then if that doesn't work I'll give him lilbig's advice.

You all are great.