Need help getting windows to start

My laptop will not start windows. I keep getting the blue screen and it goes to a prompt that tells me windows did not start properly. When I try to use any of the startup options I can not get any of them to work. I uninstalled a few unneeded programs recently, used cc cleaner to fix errors and ran defrag and now I have this problem. I was getting it to go into windows yesterday and this morning, but when it did, nothing would run properly and several things would not come up and error out. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Thanks in advance,

Keyser

 

BTW, I am running Windows XP Pro. I have the disk and am unsure as to how to proceed in fixing the error. I am relatively unexperienced so any step by step instructions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again,

Keyser318

 

When you turn the computer on press F8 while your bios is loading, it should bring up a list of start up options, down the bottom it should have ..start from last known good configuration....select this option.

 

That doesn't work either.

 

This thread should probably be in the software section.... anyway... try booting to your Windows XP CD and running a chkdsk from there. Check out this link for more chkdsk info....
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315265/en-us
If the chkdsk doesn't help, try a safe install of Windows 'over the top' of itself. You shouldn't lose any programs or documents. BTW- a bit more info would be helpful: what type of errors, blue screen error codes, what was uninstalled and what else happened right before the problems started, etc...
If you know the maker of your hard drive, you can go to their web site and download a free diagnostic tool to boot into to test your drive's health and file structure and physical/mechanical integrity....

hopperdave2000

 

If no one else can offer any help or suggestions

Try a "Repair" Install of windows, generally a repair install will save all programs & data
If you Format you loose everything.

How to perform a windows xp repair Install
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

 

I removed some trivial programs like msn live, adobe acrobat and some other similar programs to try and free up some hard disk space. I then ran defrag on my harddrive and then later ran cccleaner and had it fix errors. I believe it was around this time that I began to act funny. Some of the errors I get when I was able to get it to get to windows was that my virus protection would pop up and say a critical file was missing and it failed to start. Outlook Express would also fail to start when I clicked on it. Also the computer would not come out of hibernation and I would have to restart it around the hibernation. These were the last symptons before I couldn't get the windows console to come up at all. I am having trouble getting windows to come up by booting off the disk. All it seems to want to let me do is format and reinstall. I tell it to boot off the cd drive, and then it asks me whether i want to install, repair or exit. When I go to repair it, goes through some files and then leaves me at a c prompt. I am unsure what to do at this point. Also when I go to install, it tells me I can format the drive and reinstall in four different formats. I do not know which way to proceed.

Thanks again for everyone's help.

Keyser

 

If you were desperate enough for hard drive space to remove acrobat you must have been very short of space. Windows works best when the hard drive is less than 50% full. When there is less than 15% left it becomes very unstable and starts dumping things and slowing down. Do you know the state of your drive before the crash? Could it have been filled up with a virus (worm)?

If you can't even start windows now you have two choices

A full clean install
Either from an windows xp CD or from your manufacturer's recovery disk

A repair install
You will need a MICROSOFT Windows XP disk NOT a manufacturer's rescue or restore disk. However the good news is any XP of the same type (home or pro) will do so you can borrow one if you don't have one.
A repair install will not affect your data or settings but some programs, paticularly antivirus will be broken and need reinstallation afterwards.

Start the pc and go to the bios (setup) by pressing del or F2 or whatever immediately.
Make sure that the boot sequence is 'CD then floppy then HDD'.
Save and exit bios.
While the pc is running insert the XP CD.
Reboot
Watch and at the the prompt '? press any key to boot from CD'
Press any key.
XP setup runs.
Press enter to 'setup windows now' ; DO NOT press R
Press F8 to accept licence
The next screen shows XP installations on your hard drive
Highlight yours and press R
The repair install proceeds for about 45 minutes.
If XP asks for the key read in the one off the side of the pc not the one off the disk. (some e.g. Dells don't ask I've just done 2 today for after lightening damage the motherboards.)
You will have to reinstall SP1 and or SP2 if your disk is old
Some programs will work some will need reinstalling.

 

I will try that. I only have a 10GB harddrive on my laptop. I am not sure what was taking up all of my space, so I was trying some different things to try and clear it out.

I just ran chkdsk and the message I got was "the volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems.

I will try want you mentioned.

Thanks again.

Keyser

 

If you ran CCleaner and had it 'Fix Issues', it scanned the registry and provided a list of potetntial problems. If you decided to wipe them all out, it could be that the registry is now corrupt. No reg cleaner is 100% safe 100% of the time. I cleaned my reg to death once and had to reload Windows... so: like I mentioned before, and others have since then, a repair/reload of Windows over itself is probably your best bet.... did you run the chkdsk with the /r switch??? The /r will attempt to repair and recover any data found in a corrupt section of the drive by moving it to a 'safe' area on the drive....

hopperdave2000

 

This is not a good sign.

As hopperdave2000 suggested, it would be a really good idea to run the drive manufacturer's diagnostics on the drive at this point.

It might also be a good idea to boot from another disk (CD-ROM, another hard drive, whatever) and copy whatever data files you can get at to another disk. If you're doing this, you'll need to boot into an O/S that understands the filesystem on your hard drive. A FAT32 O/S like Windows 95 doesn't understand NTFS - which is the filesystem that WinXP usually uses.

 

I only tried chkdsk /p. I am not running chkdsk /r. When I tried to do a repair it says that everything is too corrupted, damaged, etc. and will only let me format and reinstall. It gives me four choices in which to format and the install. I will post as soon as I get the results from chkdsk /r.

 

I also am having trouble finding out what hd I have on my laptop, Pavilion N5415. I would try the diagnostic, but I don't know the manufacturer.

 

I ran chkdsk /r and it gets 50% of the way through and then says that the volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems. When I just run plain chkdsk, it says the volume appears fine and it didn't check it.

 

Does it sound like my hard drive is shot, or does it sound like the files are so corrupted I need to reformat the hard drive and reload windows? I apologize if I seen really slow, but I don't know very much about this scenario. Thanks so much for your help.

Keyser

 

Have you tried HP's support pages for your machine? If you haven't, go here.

The machine's BIOS will identify the hard drive on completion of the POST in some machines. The BIOS screen appears before the Windows splash screen, and goes by pretty quickly; be ready to hit the PAUSE key when it appears so that you have time to read it.

Either is possible, which is why it's important to get your data off it any way you can. Unfortunately, laptops aren't as easy to deal with that way as desktops. Too often, laptop hard drive connections are proprietary, which effectively prevents you from mounting it in another machine unless the second machine is a close match.

 

I messed up

 

I ran a hard drive diagnostic test and it said that the drive may fail soon. I'm not sure what it means by may, but is there any way to get into windows at this point? Would a boot disk help, or is my only option to format and see if I can reload windows? The only way I seem to be able to get to a c:/ prompt is if I boot to the windows disk and pick the recover option. I do have most of my important data off of my computer (I think) because when it began acting funny, that was the first thing that I did.

Thanks again for all of the help.

Keyser