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OS locks up on boot

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by irctrix

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I have a friends computer i was looking at the other day that would lock up every time it booted. Sometimes it would restart then lock up after it rebooted on its own. They are running Windows XP with 128 megs of ram and a 768 processor.

I was wondering if it would be wise to hook their hard drive up to a test computer as a slave drive to run scans on it to try to clean up what i suspect are trojans and viruses infecting the drive causing to to be unstable?

6 replies

by caleb

Trojans and viruses are always a possibility, but there are a couple other things to examine.

1. Can you boot into safe-mode? If so, it is likely a corrupted device driver or program launching on startup. This would also help you determine if it is a viral infection.

2. Does the computer have Service Pack 2 installed? If so, the boot menu (F8) will allow you to boot with the option to disable automatic reboot on error. This will give you a blue screen that will help you diagnose the problem.

3. Test the memory or swap the RAM modules with known good modules.

4. Remove peripherals such as modems and network cards and try booting again.

by unidentified

I agree with caleb after going into safe mode remove the driver for the display. I run into this several times an it work after rebooting. Just keep in hand the driver for the display in case...

Niwroc

by irctrix

Even when booting into safe mode it locks up. As for memory i cant just swap that out without them buying more as i have none of that speed ram to test on their board. I guess next chance i have to look at it though i can start swapping out parts i have spares of to try this and that on it too.

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