Computer help pt. 1 (dead)

Grim/Don

Grim/Don

Joined
Feb 1, 2003
Messages
1,221
My 2nd computer won't boot, not even in Safe Mode. It had died on my once before and I had a buddy wipe and put XP pro on it for me. Now it goes through the start up screen and dies on me. It's a Dell P1.3, about 4-5 years old.

Any ideas?
 
Umm.. Be more specific if possible , sounds like your hard drive took a dump as in , throw it really hard and take it apart and play with the cool little magnets inside.
 
By dies on you are you saying the machine shuts off? Goes into a reboot cycle/loop? Gets to OS and gives an error?
 
I started with a friend's laptop. They didn't have anti-virus software or a firewall on it and her son decided to surf the web with it. It is infected with something.

It would boot and pop a nag message a Yes and a No button on top of the login screen. Pressing one or the other would cause it to start logging in and then it would generate an exception of some sort and reboot.

I finally got it to change the boot order so I could see what it was doing and tweak to bios settings. Then it got the blue screen of death and rebooted again. Things looked promising because it was actually logging in!

Then another blue screen of death, a reboot, a CHKDSK with no problems, and I see the Windows XP black screen with the scroll bar in a normal login sequence and the speakers "pop" I get a blue screen of death for about 1 to 2 seconds and it reboots and repeats.

Is this machine totally screwed? The laptop has data on it that isn't backed up that she wants me to save if I can. At this point I think my only option is to reformat the hard drive the DVD drive.

This laptop is a Compaq Presario 2100 running Windows XP Pro service pack 1. It is a pretty laptop but, I'm not realy sure what the CPU and memory are. If I can snap a picture with my camera at the right moment, I might be able to tell more about what hardware it has and what is going on.

Anyone have some good suggestions for a possible fix or, do I just reformat the hard drive and start over with a clean machine and load the right software to keep the spyware, malware, viruses, etc. away this time?

THANKS!
 
Yeah it sounds like the HD to me as well. It comes up to a screen that lists some of the compenents and has the Dell logo on the right, ands says press <del> to continue. Goes to the XP screen and then the screen goes black and it reboots itself. Comes up to the component screen. It does give the option for Safe Mode or Last Good, but both of them do the same thing. It had shot craps on me before, so I'm thinking it's hosed up again. If you want, I can try to get the list of stuff it tries to load in Safe Mode before it dies...

If I can tell the wife that the internet experts (you guys! :D ) say it dead, then I have leverage to push for building me a new one.
 
boot it into safe mode. don't focus on everything it shows, only remember the last thing it shows. I'd almost be willing to bet the last thing it shows is

agp440.sys

That is a registry component and the last component needed to boot into safe mode. If you have an XP disc around you can boot from the disc and go into recovery mode.

From there type "chkdsk/r" let it do its thing for a while then when its done type "exit" that is not a guaranteed fix though, it only works sometimes. Otherwise its easiest to wipe and reinstall, maybe with a new Hard Drive..........or just build a new machine :)

that often fixes the issue and yes it is comonly related to a bad sector on the Hard Drive.
 
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