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#1
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XP Pro Freezes at start up?
i had a fully working computer until 20 minutes ago
Windows XP freezes at startup, whenever i click on my account it freezes at "loading personal settings" The only time i can get past the loading personal settings screen is if i click my account as soon as the welcome screen appears. Once i get to the desktop it all seems fine, but nothing will respond, one time it did say "impropper shutdown VGA pool..." something about the VGA pool, I am not sure at all what this means, but all i know now is the computer is as good as dead! I put the windows XP disk into the cd-rom and pressed the restart button on the case, the computer restarts, but wont boot into XP setup it just goes straight into the operating system, and the problem of not being able to get passed the welcome screen occurs again, as does the problem with the desktop freezing when i manage to get passed the welcome screen. I am now completely stuck, I have put the hard drive from the computer into my old computer (the one i am on now) and was hoping that i would be able to format it through windows (right click format) or even through the command line with format f: but it wont work the hard drive has practically merged with my old one and when i view it there are all my files on it that were in the root of the drive... Hijack this, etc. etc. i try to format and i get the following message in the command line. "format cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Format may run if this volume is dismounted first. ALL OPENED HANDLES TO THIS VOLUME WOULD THEN BE INVALID, would you like to force a dismount on this volume Y/N" I click Y to indicate yes and the following message appears "Cannot lock the drive. The volume is still in use" I then tried to right click on the F: drive and select format. this raises the following prompt "Windows cannot format this drive. Quit any disk utilities or other programs that are using this drive, and mae sure that no window is displaying the contents of the drive then try formatting again" The problem is, i have just installed the drive onto the slave IDE and havent opened any programs from it, all i have done is opened the drive to see what was in it, i cant work out how i can format this drive. I am stuck, i cant format through XP setup on the computer the drive should be in as i explained earlier, i cant format in my old computer because apparantly the drive is being used ? is it just me or have microsoft made it impossible to do any maintenance on your computer without the assistance of a tech who charges £2 per hour on the phone? anyone please help? |
#2
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You need to use the Recovery Console. This can be run from the XP
setup CD. Usually if you can get the setup CD to boot then you should get an option to access the recovery console. Otherwise you can install the recovery console as a boot option, from which you can select that to boot up instead of the core operating system. Then from the Recovery Console, login with the administrator password (if you have one set, otherwise leave this blank) and select the installation (usually 1). Once in all you need to type is the usual format c: or whatever the drive letter is and you should be ok. Drive wont be in use as your running outside of the operating system. |
#3
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Something is horribly wrong. Have you set the boot devices correctly in the bios? It will only boot from the cd if you tell it to. And there's always bootdisk.com too. FIXED i replaced the cd-rom drive i was suing with an older one from my old machine and it booted up windows xp setup fine maybe it was the cd-rom drive i was using? |
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