XP Pro BSOD reboot loop right after logo screen

Hello. I have a system that I was trying rid of malware with the gracious help from malware removal forum. Thread is here... http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=215871 While we were looking for the problem and seemed to have maybe found it... The very next reboot after starting combofix started this reboot problem. I know I can fix by format and reinstall and reconfigure and on and on... but was hoping to work through the problem and get it fixed with minimal rework. I have second hard drive with a fresh copy of xp installed and can see the files on the other drive drive I'm trying diagnose/fix. Things I've done during this process already...

1. memtest for 23 passes
2. remove all hardware except hard drive, memory and video card
3. swapped single sticks of memory while working on bare minimum hardware
4. tried a repair install
5. tried to use MS recover corrupted registry-couldn't get back into safe mode

And I still can not log on via Safe mode, safe mode command prompt, normal mode and last known good configuration

After all this I still get a BSOD too fast to read even for video camera (yes I tried it) right after the xp logo. Anything else I can do to try to resolve this?

 

Hey Tim. Fancy meeting you here. :wave Your link is covered under number 5 above (MS recover corrupted registry). Since I have another installation to log into at this point... Is there a log that combofix might have left right before the original reboot that I can look at or someone can look at to see what changed in the registry and maybe change it back somehow?

 

Try these steps. I'm not sure if finding out what's causing the BSOD will solve your problem but I think it's worth a shot.

 

Ahhhh... That's where that is. I thought there was some way to stop it from an auto restart, but never noticed that selection before. I will try that first.

I have a thought I wanted to throw out there. Can I take the fresh install registry hives and toss them on the problem drive. shutdown. disconnect fresh install drive. attempt to boot into safe mode on problem drive. assuming that would get me into safe mode... could I then access system restore to attempt a system restoration back a few weeks? Or is system restoration tied into the original registry somehow preventing that theory from working?

 

Ok got the stop error - 0x0000007b (thanks to dyamond's link) and did a little searching, found some guides to try to resolve this. One article suggested a boot sector virus but I got to read more into them yet.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324103

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/findbyerrormessage/a/stop0x0000007b.htm

Any other suggested places to look for help on this too?

 

Ok, somehow I made some progress on this. I managed to change the stop error from 7b to 7e. I can now also boot to safemode. Where to go from here?

 

Thanks for that link. I will look at it in detail and try as many things as I can. I did try one thing to see if I could get a different behavior and what I did was boot onto another hard drive and swap many of the drivers of a certain date on the broken install with ones from the bootable drive. After reboot to broken install... it then hung where windows logon would normally occur, but never got there. It didn't stop error or loop. didn't seem froze either as I could still use the keyboard to turn numlock on/off. But the logo looked of odd size too, so I'm sure something wasn't right, but I didn't expect it to even get past the stop error again. Since the files were from a SP2 install and the broken install is SP3...I swapped them all back then and got the stop error again. So I'm thinking there's half a chance I might be able to track this down.

 

Well I managed to fix the BSOD 0x7e by reinstalling video driver and scheduling a chkdsk at boot time. Not sure which did the job. The chkdsk took a looooong time. I went to bed and let it run. So it booted up in the morning but many settings were messed up and installations not valid. so I attributed this to what I did with the registry files trying anything to get it to boot. So one last effort I redid the registry hives back to right when I started having spyware problems and started running scans. One of the scans made bak files for me. So I tried those. then it wouldn't let me log in due to re-activation being needed. I tried to activate it but no love as I needed to log in to get the wireless utility started I think. I'm going to try a wired connection yet but is there a way I can reset the activation in recovery mode or something? I tried a repair install but no change there. This is my one last ditch effort before I reformat... which I was really trying to avoid.

 

Well just wanted to follow up on this. Even though I managed to get the thing to boot and even after a repair install... there were so many things broken, I finally just bit the bullet and reformated. I'm now back in business with everything updated and configured better than before, and I'm dropping Internet explorer except for windows update, in favor of chrome and using some extensions. Still haven't been brave enough to go back to the web page that caused all this mess. I'll probably find any other way I can to get our Lost episodes we missed so that I can avoid that page.

Thanks so much for the help from everyone. I learned a lot about malware & how some things work in windows.