[Windows XP Home] Only Boots in Recovery Console (also Safe Mode hangs on agpCPQ.sys)

Hello there, I'm Luke!

First off, I'd like to mention that I've read through this thread on the forum:
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=199765
which I found after many many Google searches about the issues I'm having!

I don't really know where to start with this, so please forgive me if things are a bit all over the place! I won't post about EVERY. LAST. DETAIL. on this first post, as it may fill an entire page worth with just the first post, that and the fact that it may be off-putting to anyone reading it!

NOTE: My Packard Bell Windows XP PC/computer is over 11 years old (got it back in 2003), of which through a recent 'chkdsk' I found out that I had last reformatted it back in January 2007, so I've been using it fine since then, mostly on and off, and more-so 'off' since getting a new Windows 7 64-bit laptop about a year and a half ago now!

Back Story

Anyway, I'm going to start this story/journey from where things went from normal, to bad, to worse!

About almost a week ago now, I loaded up my old Windows XP PC like normal and as it hadn't been on in about a week or more at this point, then Norton Internet Security needed to run updates and a quick scan to 'fix' it from showing red as a warning, instead of green to show its all good/safe! This is just one of many many times I've done that, as I haven't been using this PC as much since getting the aforementioned Win7 laptop, but I still use that old PC for mostly running virus scans, updates, syncing my iPod with iTunes, etc!

After that had finished, I ran a few Malwarebytes scans on the system, as I think it was the end of the free-trail period in the next day or two at this point, but with it being a decade-old PC, it takes forever to run even the 'quickest' or 'hyper' scans, we're talking about hours here haha!

Side-note: Upon first installing the Malwarebytes free-trail, the scan I ran had found only 2 issues after either many hours or almost a day I think it may have been, but this was just for the threat scan!

I had previously tried running a custom scan with all options enabled and for scanning both the C: (56GB main system internal HDD) and F: (external 500GB SeaGate HDD) drives, of which after almost 2-full-days it had only done about 90,000 files almost on the C: drive, with probably a good couple hundred-thousand on there to scan, as well as potentially millions on the larger F: drive, so I ended up having to cancel that scan, as it was looking to take weeks or maybe even a month or more! :/

At this point I had given up on Malwarebytes scanning, and any full-system scans on Norton Internet Security also took a good day or two and would only really find tracking cookies or something like that!

I still have Avast! Internet Security installed too (conflicting... I know I know...) but it's been disabled for the most-part, as I had originally purchased it a few years back with a 1-year license when it was on offer for about half the usual price (£19.99 I think), then after that year it was back up to about £39-50 for a year for 1 PC only, where as with Norton you could have 3 PCs for a year for £24-29!

The reason I mention Avast! is because I tried and failed to update its software a couple of times, which took several hours each time, and in the end I finally managed to update it to its newest version, along with the newest virus definitions too! After this I proceeded to to a boot-time scan, one of the reasons why I still kept it installed, and after letting this run overnight and through most of the following day, it had found quite a number of malware/PUP etc and had moved them to the chest, so that they were no longer infecting the system and so that I could see if any important files, programs, etc were part of it, before choosing to delete or keep them locked in there until the malware 'went away', which has happened with some files before in past years!

It was after this, where things started going wrong...

Main Issues!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you've been reading everything from my 'back story' up until this point, then thank you for your patience and time for reading through my post so far, and I hope you'll keep on reading now that I've finally got to the main issues!

If you haven't been reading everything up until now, then now is where I hope you will start reading!...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

I can't actually remember what happened, if there was a crash/reboot of any kind, or if I had just restarted the system...
ACTUALLY, I think what happened was that I had right-clicked on my C: HDD and was going to run an error checking disk scan or whatever it's called again, then my PC rebooted as per instructed to do so, but the scan couldn't run properly/at all due to "cannot open volume for direct access", at which point it wouldn't boot into Windows XP properly anymore and got stuck in a reboot-loop of trying to run the checkdisk as a result somehow!

I was on my phone looking up many Google results for what to do about this issue, none of which seemed to be of any help! I was however able to boot into Safe Mode at the time, but this or any other rebooting would still start with the checkdisk screen first, before then moving on into safe mode or rebooting if it was trying to load up normally!

Whilst in safe mode, I had tried doing a few system restores, but all of which failed to load the computer normally, and in safe mode would tell me that each system restore had failed to restore! Eventually, and I don't know how/why, but even safe mode and the other boot-options wouldn't work either :/ and booting into safe mode, would show the list of drivers being loaded, and proceed to hang after agpCPQ.sys was the last one listed, with powering off the PC being the only way to go from there!

Eventually, I ended up in the Windows Recovery Console... oh yeah, now might be a good time to point out that my Windows XP installation is OEM and didn't come with a Windows-XP boot-CD that I have seen mentioned on many hundreds of search results and info I've been through! It does however come with a floppy disk, which I tried booting into the system from, and after some text about Windows 98 and whatever it may have been starting to do or not came up on the screen, I decided to power off and remove the floppy, before it potentially reformatted my system and maybe even installed Windows 98 if that happened to be the wrong floppy! I've not tried it again since then, just incase it was the wrong one, but it has my name written on it and it was with my Packard Bell software library discs in the box, which I think I have used it in the past before for reformatting my system/HDD back in 2007!

Anyway, in the recovery console I ran a chkdsk /p /r (or /r /p ?) at the time of reading up about all the commands available to me through there, and just the fact that the checkdisk itself wouldn't run before through the normal way, yet when I used it through this method, it ran like it should do and 'fixed' any errors that were found, but didn't really list anything regarding which ones were found and fixed! Despite having ran this /chkdsk and rebooting the system, it still starts up with the checkdisk screen first, and doesn't boot into Windows at all after that, just back to its rebooting loop again!

I've tried looking up just about everything I could through Google searching about Windows XP and the issues I've had along the way, of which I have a notepad file on my laptop here that has a long list of links to ones I had found that were either useful or not, or may just be good to keep a note of for present/future reference again!

I've also tried resetting the BIOS to load up the default settings on there, but that never helped to sort anything out really, and the system still loads up in this rebooting loop of trying & failing to run the checkdisk, before proceeding to reboot instead of booting into Windows!

Out of all the links I've got, I thought that this one would be my only/last hope of getting it to work:
http://www.aitechsolutions.net/winxpnoboot.html

It was earlier on tonight that I tried giving that solution a go, by going through each step carefully and making sure to follow it to avoid making anything worse, but it was when I got to the part about copying the files over from the repair directory, that my hopes had been shattered once again, as I found out that my system doesn't have all of the repair files necessary to replace each one, and infact it only has the 'System' file in that repair folder!
I haven't tried copying over just that one file to see if that would fix anything, as that and several other posts that I ended up finding with the same information, mentioned that you must copy over ALL 5 of those needed registry files, incase parts of the registry were between each of the tiles, and so that the computer would start up again properly, or well hopefully, if that solution had worked out!

Finally-ish, I went on a Google search once again to see if there was anything regarding those missing .bak files that I needed in order to continue, but to no real results, apart from finding one of those many pages with that same solution, saying that you shouldn't do this method on an OEM installed Windows XP, but it looks like I can't anyway if I don't have the repair files needed and when I don't have an XP boot-CD of any kind!

**RECENT UPDATE** - At the time of starting to write this post, about over an hour ago now, I had tried disabling the previously mentioned 'agpCPQ.sys' driver that safe mode wouldn't boot past, and then after a reboot/exit from the recovery console, safe mode had a loading progress bar (like the recovery console does) but after it filled it never went any further than that! So then I enabled the driver back to the way it was (boot option) and tried loading up windows again, to be greeted by that same checkdisk screen and the following reboot again... yay! :banghead

I then tried booting up the system in 'Enable VGA mode', something of which I had tried before and it would only stay on the initial Packard Bell background screen, where normally the user login window would open, but nothing had happened previously, even if left for an hour or so, but this time something special happened... IT ACTUALLY LOADED INTO WINDOWS AND I COULD LOGIN AND BE GREETED WITH MY DESKTOP FOR THE FIRST TIME IN DAYS!! :-D :celebrate

However, after some windows popped up about automatically setting the display to a better size, etc, it then seemed to have frozen and the screen went off, after some time the screen came back on and the display colours were a bit distorted, like it had tried loading into a 256 colour depth or something! There was however one potentially vital window that was open on the screen, which said something about an ATI driver that had failed or wasn't working properly, but before I could read it all properly, the countdown on the other window had finished counting down, to which it would normally revert back to the previous screen display settings, but instead it booted back into its rebooting checkdisck rebooting... ways
I've tried to load the system back into VGA mode again, but it just sits on the Packard Bell screen and doesn't go any further, yet the mouse can still move around the screen, although it seems to lag and sometimes vanishes off the screen if I had moved it too much when it wasn't moving!

So now I'm pretty much back to square one of not knowing what to do or where to go next :/ I'm sure anyone reading/replying to this, will tell me to just ditch WinXP now that I have a Win7 laptop, and to backup my old HDD on there if possible somehow, before potentially doing a reformat to get it all 'working' again!

At the very very least, I'd want to be able to backup the entire HDD if possible, either as an image (somehow), or as an almost each-and-every-file copied over from there to my external HDD that's connected to that PC! So that I can keep anything and everything I still want to keep a hold of, before having to do another reformat of Windows XP, for the first time since 2007!

Okay, so I may have probably covered each and every detail there, but I felt that if I had missed anything out, then no one would be able to understand or follow as to how my PC got to this point in time! Although, with how big this post is, I'd be surprised if anyone could even follow it properly!

Just wanted to finish off by saying a big THANK YOU to anyone who does take their time out to read and hopefully reply too! I can provide as much more info as needed, where possible, but as I can't seem to boot into that PC properly, then I can't really provide proper system specs or any other info accessed normally through the standard Windows interface!

I await any replies, and would be the most appreciative of anyone who does reply and can help me out with getting to the bottom of these issues I'm having!

Regards,
- Luke (LukesterWinXP7).

 

Re: [Windows XP Home] Only Boots in Recovery Console (also Safe Mode hangs on agpCPQ.

Yeah... sorry about that haha! :-o

Well Safe Mode itself isn't 'ok' as such, seeing as it seems to hang at that screen where all the drivers get listed, but a few days ago it would load fine past that screen and boot into safe mode as it should do, so it's baffled me as to why it would stop working without any changes being made on my part!

I've had Avast! installed on there for years now, even before I bought the paid version, and I've had Norton installed on there at the same time for the last year or so at least now, without any conflicting issues that I'm aware of.

It's Windows XP SP3 I'm running on there, with all of the last windows updates and such that were available until Windows stopped supporting it last month there.

I haven't updated any drivers for a good number of years now, and any driver updates from windows haven't screwed up anything before now either, so it can't be anything like that!

That page you linked to is one I've already found/bookmarked previously and have tried that, although it was with disabling agpCPQ.sys rather than agp440.sys, which I mentioned on the recent update part of my first post.

I do have some more updates from last night, some surprising ones again too!

I was able to load the system up again in 'Enable VGA mode' and after logging in and everything loading up, I was greeted with many of those "Windows has recovered from a serious error" windows, of which I just clicked to send the error report on each and every one! I only checked a couple of them at the time to see the more detailed information, as I wasn't sure if it would be relevant or not to fixing any of my problems.
I did however take some pictures on my phone, and I'll just type out what information was shown on the two I did look at.

Code:

[B]Error Signature[/B]

BCCode: 100000ea    BCP1: 8A14A378   BCP2: 8A3C3E30   BCP3: F78DECB4
BCP4: 00000001    OSVer: 5_1_2600   SP: 3_0   Product: 768_1

[B]Error Report Contents[/B]
The following files will be included in this error report.

C:\DOCUME~1\Luke\LOCALS~1\Temp\WERa45f.dir00\Mini051514-02.dmp
C:\DOCUME~1\Luke\LOCALS~1\Temp\WERa45f.dir00\sysdata.xml

Code:

[B]Error Signature[/B]

BCCode: 100000ea    BCP1: 8A1D6268  BCP2: 8A54D8F8   BCP3: BA0C2CB4
BCP4: 00000001    OSVer: 5_1_2600   SP: 3_0   Product: 768_1

[B]Error Report Contents[/B]
The following files will be included in this error report.

C:\DOCUME~1\Luke\LOCALS~1\Temp\WER2610.dir00\Mini051514-03.dmp
C:\DOCUME~1\Luke\LOCALS~1\Temp\WER2610.dir00\sysdata.xml

I don't know if those will be helpful or not, but if any information from them shouldn't be shown on here, then please remove them if necessary.

After all of those error reporting windows stopped opening and they had all been sent, I was almost in the process of doing a system restore back to April 9th, the day after the last Windows XP updates! But then I decided to randomly do a LiveUpdate on Norton, as I hadn't been able to do any for almost a week of not being able to boot into windows properly, even if this still wasn't properly at this point, it's still better than just the recovery console!

The LiveUpdate required me to restart my computer, so I went ahead with it, and this is where something *new* happened... when it restarted and loaded into that damn disk check/DSKCHK as it has been doing, it actually ran! :eek

So I stayed up waiting on it to finish before going off to bed, as I wasn't wanting the computer to go back into a reboot-loop whilst I was asleep, if it still couldn't load into windows normally yet, which after a successful disk check, that was the case!

Upon rebooting into VGA mode again, I'm still greeted with the disk check screen, but now it says "The volume is clean." and continues on from there.
However, loading up into VGA mode seems to be hit and miss, as sometimes it will load up and let me login properly, other times it'll just stay on the initial Packard Bell default background screen without doing anything (even after an hour or more) and I can only move the cursor about the screen, at that point I turned it off and went to bed, and haven't loaded back up again since last night/this morning.

I'm wondering if I should try to uninstall the ATI drivers and see what happens if I reboot into windows normally from there? Shouldn't it auto-detect the drivers again as if I had installed the graphics card for the first time?

Thank you so much for your reply anyway, I really appreciate your time with helping me out so far, and I'm welcome to any further replies from yourself or any other members who may be able to help out with steering me in the right direction of getting these problems fixed!