Cannot boot or reinstall - help please.

[NeilC]

Hi

I have Windows 2000 Professional running on a desktop PC with a 3 ghz Intel 4 CPU, 512MB ram and a 100GB SATA hard-drive.

Windows has crashed and now I cannot boot up. It won't work in safe mode or any other of the modes offered when I press F8 on boot-up. It gets as far as telling me it's starting up windows, the progress meter makes it about 3/4 way over and then freezes.

I've tried booting from the Windows Disk, this goes OK and lets me install the SATA raid drivers etc but when it gets to the part that offers me the choice of a repair or install I find the keyboard doesn't work anymore and cannot go any further.

I used Bart pre-installation environment which does boot and allows me to install the SATA drivers and therefore see the drive contents and explore it. The drive works fine and a scandisk on it turned up no results.

I tried renaming the WinNT folder and booting from the Win2K disk but this went so far and then froze again.

I also got XP and tried to install that with similar results.

So I am left with a PC that I cannot use. I'd like to get some data off it since my backups are not quite up to date. I'd mainly like to get it working again too. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance

[Wudang]

try using knoppix (www.knoppix.org (http://www.knoppix.org)) which should let you recover the data. It will probbaly also give more info about what's wrong.

[Oleron]

Have you a CD-burner in the PC? Or some other form of backup device?

If so then my approach would be to use a 'live linux' disk such as Knoppix or Slax to boot into Linux and burn your data to a backup device. Then I would format the hard drive and re-install windows.

It might be possible to recover windows but it sounds as though your windows installation is toasted. You might even have a hardware problem of some sort. It sounds as though it might be easier to rescue the data and start again.

www.knoppix.com (knoppix)

http://slax.linux-live.org/

[thrombus29]

Make sure you have the Keyboard and Mouse set to be driven by BIOS instead of OS in the BIOS, that might be why the keyboard seems to freeze.

Buy a new HD, install the OS on that and get all the Data off the old disk if you can.

[NeilC]

Thanks

BartPE has Nero on it which should let me back up files but it doesn't seem to work as far as I can tell. I'll check Knoppix out - it sounds a bit like a Linux Bart?

But I'm wondering if it is a h/w problem because it does the same thing with a renamed WinNT folder. I'm no expert but with this renamed surely the windows installation CD has no idea there even is a windows installation? IE it's pretty much the same as a clean disk as far as the installation disk is concerned. Or am I wrong?

[Xeriar]

Thanks

BartPE has Nero on it which should let me back up files but it doesn't seem to work as far as I can tell. I'll check Knoppix out - it sounds a bit like a Linux Bart?

But I'm wondering if it is a h/w problem because it does the same thing with a renamed WinNT folder. I'm no expert but with this renamed surely the windows installation CD has no idea there even is a windows installation? IE it's pretty much the same as a clean disk as far as the installation disk is concerned. Or am I wrong?

Yes, such lockups are usually a sign of processor or motherboard component overheating.

[a_unique_person]

I have had lockups from spyware and viruses as well. After a re-install, no problem. (Well, not until the next one, anyway.)

[NeilC]

FYI - it turned out to be the CPU overheating.

[Zep]

See if it works under water. No? Then it's not overheating.