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computer won’t start

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My brother runs XP Home – wants me to help. He says “It won’t shut down or restart. Some different boxes come up to send the error reports to MS. Mostly relating to an application error with explorer.exe. Error signatures relating to ntdll.dll, shell32.dll and incd.exe (whatever that is). Mentions an I/O error at instruction such and such (bad memory?). I’ve had a couple of instances in the past, after the computer had been on for a long time.

That’s only been 2-4 times since I’ve had it but I was always able to restart and the problem would go away.

Now the system won’t boot, asking me to put in a boot disk. Got frustrated and turned it off. Started it back up and chkdsk ran then got to the Win desktop and that was it. Then the blue screen of death appeared:

“Problem detected, windows shut down to prevent damage to computer”
KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR
etc, etc.

Managed to get into the bios and lo and behold there is no hard drive listed anywhere. Shows my boot devices as my floppy and dvd drives. I think the only reason the desktop comes up at all is because of the ram, the physical memory. From what I’ve seen on line for reasons it seems to point to the hard drive.

I’m trying to get it going so I can back-track and start uninstalling the most recent programs that I’ve added but I can’t even do that. Haven’t found any answers on the internet, yet.”

Please help.

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In reply to computer won’t start

the explorer.exe errors are caused by malware and cured by downloading, updating and running the free for personal use adaware se from http://www.lavasoftusa.com
i don’t know if you are having further bad luck now or still malware and/or virus.
don’t panic it can find drive in bios until you force redetection there and still can’t find drive. then you got hardware problem with drive, controller or cable. start by downloading tshooting utils and read their how-to to check out drive from drive mfg website.

Reply To: computer won’t start

In reply to computer won’t start

First and formost, run a virus scan on your computer. Here is a link for a free scan : http://housecall.antivirus.com/hous…start_frame.asp

A similar error has been noted in M$’s site:
http://support.microsoft.com/defaul…&NoWebContent=1

quote:
To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack (1a) for Windows XP or the individual software update. For information on obtaining the latest service pack, please go to:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/servicepacks/

Reply To: computer won’t start

In reply to computer won’t start

this might be due to two reason one is because of the internet adware and another is your harddisk might have some problem.if there is a hard disk problem these error messages comes first and then machine will fail to start.so,try change the hard disk.

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In reply to computer won’t start

we started scanning with Hitachi’s Drive Fitness Test. It gives you a bootable floppy to be able to run the test in dos. I ran it and it came up with “bad sectors found”. It gives you the option to erase the disk (not an option yet), erase the boot sector (also not an option yet) or repair the corrupted sectors (which means I’ll loose any data in those sectors). I’m almost ready to try the sector repair and see what happens.

I wish I could at least get the system running so I could back up some of my files. I am guessing but I would think that some of the bad sectors must be in the boot section of the drive since it won’t boot. Wish me luck. If it looks like my only option is to erase all and reformat do you think it’s worth it to use this drive and give it another try or will these problems keep happening?

The only thing that has happened externally lately is that we lost power during a storm 1 or 2 weeks ago. The computer was doing an overnight rip and I woke up at 3am to find the power out. Maybe that has something to do with this.

I may try a couple of more things to try and get the system to start, somehow try and get xp to boot up. Just don’t know how, yet.

Also looking at other drive regenerator programs that would repair the bad sectors without formatting if we find that we don’t have to format. Is this a good idea?

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