Computer hangs on boot...

Stan27

I'm working on a laptop for somebody. He told me that the computer gave an error message saying "NTLDR is compressed."
That seemed to be an easy enough thing to fix, but that's not the problem I see here...

At the screen where XP loads for the first time, it hangs on the "please wait..." box. HDD light stops blinking, and the mouse stops moving.

My next steps will be to:
Use a real XP CD, and reinstall(instead of those damned recovery disks).
Try booting Knoppix to see what happens.
Use a memory test utility.


Do you guys have any ideas?

blargoe

If I'm reading you correctly, you doing a fresh install using the recovery CD, and that is what is hanging on boot once you get to the graphical interface? Hmm. I would attempt to boot to a diagnostic CD (Ultimate Boot CD is a great one, just google it) and run tests on all of the hardware components. If he was getting NTLDR errors every time something had to have corrupted it... I would run a hard disk diagnostic in addition to the memory test.

Stan27

Yes, that is what I mean.
I downloaded the Ultimate Boot CD, looks like a great tool so far.

I tried doing a format from a real XP disk, and it started crawling after 20%

My guess is the hard drive...
I'm running the test for the hard drive right now.


Thanks for the help, this is a tool I will be using a lot in the future.