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my dad came home today and noticed his computer was at the screen where you select safe mode, safe mode with networking, etc. he selected boot windows normally and after about 5 secs it comes back to the safe mode screen, this happens with every option i select. its a compaq 1.8ghz amd, its got a 80gig seagate harddrive. Thats all i know about whats in it. He hasn't installed any software resently and it was working fine yesterday. I took it out and put in my computer and ran virus scan, it didn't find anything. I took the battery out to reset the cmos, that didn' work either. Any help would be appreciated.

thanks.

Might try booting from the WinXP cd, going to the Repair, Recovery Console, and running CHKDSK /f and CHKDSK /r

i tried that, it goes through the normal thing where it load all the drivers then it sits there at starting windows(text at bottom) and does nothing else after that.

im not specialist but i guess you will have to reinstall windows

EDIT: I'm sure Norm could help you
he is the best

rivas wrote:im not specialist but i guess you will have to reinstall windows

EDIT: I'm sure Norm could help you
he is the best

Without a doubt Norm is the best hands down. I'll forever be in his debt for taking the time to help me out with a previous problem I had. And trust me...he spent a lot of time helping me.....

First let me say that this type of problem is about the worst I've ever come up against. Last time I was working on a XP machine stuck in a reboot loop, I gave up after a few hours and formatted.

After reading, and re-reading your post(s) my thoughts direct me to the video card. If you have a spare one, try swapping them out.
Windows seems to just drop dead when it can't load the drivers for high res.

A Note:
When Windows boots up, and you make a selection at the boot screen, windows continues to load, but will show the boot screen as it loads, make sure you wait long enough and give windows a chance to finish. Patience 'sometimes' helps.

Can you get to safe mode? If you can, you may be able to do a 'system restore' back to an earlier time or use hijackthis to see what's starting up (post a log if you can)

You could also try a repair of windows using the XP CD (basically is an install over top of present OS). Boot up the CD and select "Repair" and take it from there. Sometimes works, sometimes not.

Since it is possible that spyware caused this, you may want to take the HD out and scan it on another system.

If all you try doesn't pan out, get all your important data, settings etc off the drive and format it. Re-install everything from scratch.

Let us know.

Try swapping video card first. I feel it may be pooched for high res use.

nope cant get into safe mode, when trying to boot with windows xp cd it just stops at starting windows(text at bottom) and wont do anything after that. I took it out and ran virus scan and spyware on it from another computer, it didn't find anything. I'll try switching out the video card later today and see how that works. If that doesn't do it I guess i will reformat and install.

Can you do as YOSC asked (chkdsk), but with the HD in another PC?

ok ill try that too

neither of those worked. I guess ill reinstall, his computer needed it anyway.

thanks for the help.

if you haven't re-installed yet, you can pull your data off w/ ntfs reader (freeware)
http://www.ntfs.com/products.htm

the same thing happened to me i came home my comp was frozen i hit reset and everything i do just resets it again. if u found anything that worked plz tell me.

I has a similar problem. Turned out the boot sector on my hard drive corrupted somehow. Go to the manufactures website and download a scanning tool to find out.....