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Windows XP boot failure

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by flaid

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Hello,

I was minding my own business, playing Half-Life 2, when all of a sudden my computer began acting strangely. My CPU usage was abnormally high, and I hadn't rebooted in awhile, so I decided just to reboot and see if it changed anything. Well, my computer refuses to boot up now. Here's what I know--

It can get to the "Windows XP" screen with the little bar moving across, but then it hangs, shows a blue screen for a millisecond, and reboots

I cannot boot into safe mode (any flavor). It gets to MUP.SYS, hangs, and reboots.

I have ran SeaTools (Hard Drive diagnostic utility for DOS) and MemTest86 (Memory diagnostic utility for DOS) with no errors reported whatsoever.

I have tried re-installing Windows XP, but whichever choice I choose ends up hanging on the "checking your disk" part. I've let it run for 20+ minutes with no changes.

The only thing that I can think of is that my hard drive is malfunctioning in some way, but when I ran SeaTools it offered nothing in the way of error messages.

Here are my specs, if it helps anyone:

Athlon AMD 64x2 4800+ Dual-core Processor
2 GB Patriot DDR2 800 Dual-channel RAM
WinFast 7900GT 256MB PCI-16x Graphics Card
SeaGate 7200RPM 320 GB SATA hard drive
DVD/CD reader/burner (generic)
Gigabyte S-Series Motherboard

Thanks in advance for any help provided. I am a computer science student, and so my computer is very important to me (both for work and play).

-Robert Darchuk

4 replies

by thumbsup2

As a computer science student, the FIRST thing you need to learn is patience. These things take time. A 320GB hard drive will take HOURS and HOURS for the disk checking to run, especially if there are errors for it to try and fix. Try the install again and let it run, overnight if need be. But, let it run until it's done, one way or another.

The next thing you need to learn is that Sea Tools is a disk checking utility. It checks Seagate/Maxtor drives for failure or symptoms of imminent(sp?) failure (ie: heads not working properly, looks to see if platter is damaged and other hardware related issues). It is not capable of checking file integrity (ie: is a file corrupt?). It could care less if there are even any files ON the drive. It's checking the hardware

Another thing to learn is that MemTest86 only looks at RAM. It has nothing to do with the hard drive.

And finally, when a system hangs after it has already displayed MUP.SYS, it's actually trying to load the very next thing in the boot sequence. Based on past experiences, it's trying to read/load the system hive which is probably corrupt. There are proceedures for fixing a corrupt hive, but I would try the install one more time first, letting it run until IT tells you there is something wrong. THEN, we'll deal with what it tells you.

:D

by flaid

I know, and I am a rather patient person, but I've just been a little perturbed because *I* can't figure out what's wrong. But I know that memtest86 is a memory checking program, and thats what I was using it for.

Now I'm going to try what you suggested and just leave it set for hours upon hours, but a little while ago I tossed in a CD-bootable version of Ubuntu that one of my classmates gave me, and it worked just fine and I could view all of my files and look at them and everything on my hard drive, which leads me to believe that you're right and it's something on the Windows / software side of things. Thank you for your help!

by flaid

So it turns out that for some reason (if ThumbsUp2 was correct) that this corrupted system hive caused my hard drive just to not be recognized by the Windows XP installer, so here's what I did to fix it:

I bought an external hard drive (which I had been meaning to do anyway, mostly for extra storage on my laptop) and installed Ubuntu on it (because it was faster than installing XP). Then I copied over all the files I wanted to save from my internal hard drive, used SeaTools to completely erase it, and now I'm back on Windows XP. I don't know what the heck would cause this kind of error, but I'm glad I could get it all worked out (and that my hard drive wasn't dead!)

-Robert

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