HMTech.ca

Jul 25 2008

Windows XP Will Not Boot – Loops

Filed under: Technology, Troubleshooting by: brennan

A client of mine was recently unable to login to Windows XP. When I arrived to investigate, I discovered that the computer was constantly looping through the startup process. Whenever they powered on their computer, Windows XP would present them with the following menu (as many people will be familiar with):

No matter which option we selected, Windows XP would appear to start loading and then suddenly restart itself. This process would continue to loop until the computer was shut off.

Just before my client started to have this problem, they had accidentally turned off the computer before it had finished shutting down properly. Doing this caused damage to their hard drive.

I booted the computer from a Windows XP installation CD and entered into the Recovery Console.

To do this yourself, find the original Windows XP CD that came with your computer. Put it in the CD-ROM, and restart the computer. You may have to enter the BIOS configuration to change the boot sequence so that the CD-ROM is checked first. Press any key when prompted to do so (“Press any key to boot from CD”). Once in the installation procedure, press ‘R’ to enter into the recovery console.

From within the recovery console I issued the “dir” command and was presented with the error message “directory cannot be enumerated”. Immediately, I thought there was a serious issue with the hard drive.

I decided to run the “chkdsk /r” command from the recovery console. chkdsk will check hard disks for errors and attempt to fix them. chkdsk ran for about five minutes and reported that errors had been found and corrected. I then issued “dir” again and the contents of the C drive were enumerated.

chkdsk scanning for errors

I restarted the computer and, to my joy, it booted normally to the desktop.

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When my client shut off the computer before windows had finished shutting down it must have damaged a sector on the hard disk. The program chkdsk was able to fix that damaged sector. However, there’s also the possibility that their hard drive is failing. We didn’t take any chances and backed up all their important data (pictures, documents, email) before continuing as normal.