Windows XP Home Hangs on Boot

Experiencing a problem with a Windows XP machine. System hangs on boot. Reaches the point where the Windows logo is on the screen, with the green bar running left to right. However, it never goes past this point, and the action of the bar is very jumpy. It will run smoothly for about 5 seconds, then stop for 3. Then run smoothly for 5 seconds, then stop for 3.

Tried booting in safe mode, system starts loading drivers and stops and reboots on it's own before I can see how far it got. Same for safe w/ cmd prompt. Last good settings is even worse, it dosen't even get to the logo.

All this person can tell me is that they got the blue screen of death while using Windows, and restarted the machine manually. Then this happened.

Suggestions on how to get Windows to start, so I can run diags?

Mike

 

In trying out some spare memory for my kid whilst upgrading his computer I ran across something similar. Hope that's not it for you.

 

As a starting point? No way.

Is this XP Service Pack 2?

At the startup options, where you choose Safe Mode, etc, choose disable automatic restart, and then choose Safe Mode. See if it gives an error you can see. Post your results.

 

Well, I figured out what it was that was causing the issue...while trying a Windows repair install, I received the error message "setupdd.sys could not be loaded. Error Code 7." This usually indicates a hardware failure, so I ran MemTest first to test the RAM and there it was. One of the two 512MB sticks of DDR were bad.

Pulled the bad stick and rebooted, and we're back in business.

The one question I have for you guys is, how can this happen? In other words, how can a perfectly fine stick of DDR suddenly fail?

Thanks in advance again.

 

Ram is mass produced, and it fails often. One of the most common things to die on a computer.